Recently a local estate agent received numerous complaints and concerns about their 3D house viewing videos. Their virtual viewing of a client’s house showed; personal photos that weren’t blurred out, financial information that you could easily screenshot and zoom into the details and capture sensitive data. There was also a lot of clues that could allow cyber criminals to hack into accounts, by guessing passwords from pet names and family members’ names being visible.
Following on from this latest news, CSP have outlined their best expert advice to ensure you are secure and protected from vulnerabilities and cyber criminals.
Our Top Tips
The number one tip is to simply have secure and strong passwords! Such a simple but forgotten about top tip…
- Use a unique username and password for separate online accounts so that in the event of falling victim to an attack, the attackers won’t have access to your other online accounts.
- Your password should also be strong and difficult to crack. It’s best to create a password that is between 10-15 characters long, these should contain a mix of upper and lowercase letters, and include numbers or symbols.
- You should have multiple and different strong passwords for all your online accounts
- You can have a password manager that is locked by only you, with a special password you create that saves all your passwords in. All you have to do is remember the password to your chosen password manager
- If you believe an online account of yours has been compromised then make sure to change the password for this online account.
Other Top Tips to Consider
- Secure your wireless network and don’t have passwords visible on routers, as you could be vulnerable to losing your personal information if a cybercriminal has your details and hacks into the network. Read more here.
- Change the default name of your home Wi-Fi, this will mean an attacker or someone who is targeting home routers won’t know who the router belongs to or which provider the router is with.
- Ensure your home router is using the most secure router security protocol which is; WPA2-PSK (AES), this is the most secure option as it uses the Wi-Fi encryption standard and the latest AES encryption protocol.
- Don’t overshare your location or what you’re doing, as this can tell criminals when you’re home or not and can give them password clues like family names or pet names for passwords
- Check your key accounts for any suspicious behaviour and check your security settings to secure accounts
- Make sure all sensitive information like letters, are never in sight, store them away appropriately and even lock it in a draw if you can
More advice on cyber security can be found here and across our news page here.