Hackers can make you feel powerless. Here are several ways to protect yourself (and your technology) from those who seek to infiltrate it:
Strong and Different Passwords
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Let’s start off with the basics: do not use the same password for all of your accounts, and make sure that your passwords are complex. In the past, I’ve talked about using services and programs such as lastpass and keypass in order to manage passwords. What I really like about these programs is that they are free and allow you to only have to remember one password in order to login everywhere. They also have a really nice feature that will generate new and random passwords for you for all of your different websites.
The reason for this is that if a hacker gets one of your passwords, you don’t want to give them the opportunity to be able to log in to all of your online accounts. Random and different passwords makes this much more difficult.
I also recommend setting up some form of two factor authentication. I’ve done a full podcast on two factor authentication, but it basically secures logins with two different types of security, something you know like a password, and something you have like a phone or a key. Typically for my bank accounts and other secure accounts I like to have this extra measure of security. What’s nice is that having two factor authentication set up makes life much harder for hackers because they not only need your password, but they also need the device for the second part of the authentication.
