5 Ways To Improve Your Internet Security

Hi, I’m Chris, and in this video I’m going to talk to you about how you can beef up your Internet security. With information being passed around the Internet more freely these days, it’s much more important for you to keep your information secure to yourself. I’m going to talk to you about a few ways you can do this today.

The first way is to pick the best password for you, usually about eight characters long. I’m not talking about Snow White and the seven dwarfs, of course. I’m talking about it being alphanumeric and eight letters and/or numbers long. Good to use a mixture of upper and lower case text as well. So, as you can see from the example here, I’ve chosen bumblebee with a couple of capital B’s, lowercase everything else, and for the E’s at the end some three’s. That’s a good example there. It’s always good to not use something that you would easily be associated with, like your pet’s name or your street or something like that. It makes it a lot less easy for people to hack.

Another option is to have multiple passwords across all of your accounts, so a different password for your Facebook, a different password for your Twitter, etc., etc. This way you don’t have to worry if one of the passwords is hacked so much as you would do with having to change every single other password across all of your other accounts. One way that this would be a little bit of a problem is if you had so many passwords you couldn’t obviously remember them all, and a solution of that would be to have some password storage.

Now password storage is quite a lot easier these days than it used to be. People used to write them on their hands, on their pieces of paper in their wallets and everything like that. Now, you’ve got smartphones, you can actually download free and paid apps. These apps are fantastic because you can actually store all of the passwords locally on the phone so they’re not in any of the airwaves. They’re not installed on anyone’s servers to be hacked or anything like that, and you alone have the password to unlock these pieces of software. This way you’re completely in control of having different passwords for every account and also being completely accountable for your own.

The fourth idea is to have a two-step verification set-up. Google do this quite well, and they actually have an authenticator app, which you attach to your phone, or you can actually just attach your phone with your mobile number and they send you a text every time you log in or every time you log into an untrusted computer, and this means that you’re actually attached to your account via the security of your phone as well as the security of your password. Facebook do something very similar lately, and that is again a similar type of thing where you actually log in and then it says “this is an untrusted computer” and you will get a text and you type in the code.

The final way that you can do this is to make sure that your virus and malware protection on your computers is up to date. This way it will stop any malicious software getting into your computer and accidentally meaning that you end up losing all of your passwords or secure information and then have your information hacked online.

There’s loads of other ways to do this, and if you’ve got any other ideas, feel free to add some comments in or follow me on Twitter and Facebook, and also make sure that you click some of the links below.