How to avoid being hacked

They say you only miss the sun when it starts to snow, only know your lover when you in denial, you only understand the pain of a biting ordeal when it knocks at your doorstep. I have have never been bothered by hacking before as it did a few days ago. I am not saying this because it has never happened to someone I know before no, I am saying this because it happened to the closest person I have known for the rest of my life. As much as this affected him directly, I felt like I was being compressed and I was in a jeopardy on what to do. For starters, such situations become difficult when in the entire family. Almost everyone looks up to you in matters high tech though I am not an expert but just privileged with the little knowledge.

You woke up today in the morning and as you still contemplating on the daily routine and of course where to begin from, bing! Your phone chimes and immediately you open a text that leads you to updating some of your phones credentials give it google. Little do you know that is a malware or a spyware or a keylogger and the moment you accepted it you invited trouble for the rest of the day probably an experience you will never forget for the rest of your life.

That is how hackers easily bug you or rather that is how you get hacked. When we talk of hacking we tend to think of complexity in terms of dark web, cyber crime and all that but hacking can be done to you as easy as 123.

The easiest way is being phished and that happens by someone spiking you with a malware message, after you clicking, whatever you type becomes visible to whoever wants to get to you. Hackers only require your password to access your accounts and information. Once they get an hold to that, first thing they do is immediately change the password hence locking you out entirely from what you once called `yours`.

With your information now fully under their control – for instance pictures, social media accounts, contacts, emails and browser history they can use that to con people related to you. They can get access to your bank accounts using the details in your phone to borrow loans using your name, carry out social media scum using your social media accounts or use some of your browser history to blackmail you in a bid of distorting cash out of your pockets.

Probably such situation does not end there, first it can easily leads to depression because you can loose some documents, files and other important information. In a case of social media scumming, you stand a chance of being banned from such platforms, ideally your reputation gets ruined and if you had a brand that will be affected too because it takes time to understand that you were hacked and someone clowned your identity and used it for malicious vantage.

However with technology many ways have since been put in place to try and prevent you from being hacked. One of them is the use of Multi-factor Aunthentication others call it two-step verification. This method uses a secondary piece of information often a code generated by an app or sent via sms alongside a password. This secondary piece of information helps prove that you are the real owner trying login and codes are normally send to you via you mobile number or email. If it is not you then the account is locked thereafter you will be taken through a process of retrieving it. An attacker cannot access your account with two verification code not unless one has your phone. Second way to beat this is by getting a password manager, at this era you should avoid using 1234 as your password for any of your accounts. All passwords used should be strong and unique, they should be long, include mixture of characters and should not be used across multiple websites. Learn to change your passwords more often.

Third way is getting to know how to spot a phishing attack, quick clicking should not be a routine. When you receive a message, first read through it before clicking or at least scan through it. Stop clicking links in hurry or when not relaxed, hackers has the clicking power over you.

Forth way is you should always run an update on your devices every now and then, this updates come up with some bugs fixed hence rendering hackers useless in getting to some systems or gadgets. Another way to do this is by encrypting everything in your phone. Encrypting gives that privacy of your content being only known between you and the receiver and not even the medium admin can access any of the information. All accounts most specifically social media can be encrypted and the first one that should always be secure is email or google account.

Finally you should always learn how to wipe your digital history, this can be done by ensuring you delete your browser history from time to time. Another part is by collapsing all the search engine tabs after browsing has been done. Avoid logging your accounts and emails on public devices and not logging them out after use. If this won`t give you an hint on how to avoid being hacked, then cybersecurity classes which is costly could be your next stop.