Five Mistakes You Might Have Been Doing

Not only citizens and corporates are the victims of the cyber crime, it has come to the light that cyber criminals are also targeting the governments across the globe. Pew Research Centre in their recent report has revealed that despite the increasing awareness against the cybercrime, people using the internet are committing old school mistakes.

Out of these 5 mistakes, you could be committing at least one mistake. Note this mistake and improve upon it before it is too late:

1. Email: Phishing through email is common even today. When phishing through email was a new method to harass the user, there was no or less awareness. But, even today, despite increasing awareness among internet users, the cybercrime through email has not stopped. By the spear phishing, criminals are repeatedly improving the targeted emails. These new spear phishing does not show telltales which include a random email address, grammatical mistakes, wrong spellings, and obviously unusual claims that you won millions.

2. Social media: the Social platform has become the prey spot for the criminals. There are still so many people who cannot tell how to change their privacy settings. According to a survey conducted in 2016, there were 58% users who did not know how to update their settings for privacy. With emails, you can check the originality of the sender, but with messages in your social media account, you cannot easily recognize as the links most likely be shortened. You should be cautious on trending hashtags because criminals use trending hashtags for their bait.

3. Attitude: People do not become alerted or cautious before it happens to them. This is the attitude that needs to be changed to avoid being the victim of cyber crime. It can be considered as the biggest hurdles to save users from becoming the victim of cybercrime. It should be precisely noted that everyone using the Internet is a potential victim. One of the examples of poor attitude against cyber crime is having a Wifi username and password not up to the mark with respect to hacking.

4. Password: On account of the attitude above, users have set their passwords that are easy to guess. God forbid, if you are using the same password across every network and platforms, then you will go deep into the mud. Brute forcing passwords are increasing at an increasing pace and these are a cake walk for criminals with expertise in advanced computer knowledge. Still, people have set their passwords as 12345667 or qwerty, or something guessable. As per the Forrester, the passwords are stolen because of weak passwords. There are some services and browsers that can help you to choose and remember sophisticated passwords. You can use passphrases as well to manage your passwords.

5. Software updates: Users have a tendency to delay the software updates. Sometimes, they think apps are time-consuming, or sometimes they try to save data. But amidst these adjustments, they compromise with their security. If we don’t update the software, then your system becomes vulnerable to cyber attacks. It is so because criminals are most likely to exploit the flaws in the older version of the software. So, make sure that your software is updated regularly and as soon as possible.

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