Protect Yourself Online In 2015

If you didn’t have an account hacked in 2014 (you probably did) you will in 2015. 

Here are my best tips to help protect yourself online in 2015:

Enable Two Factor Authentication
One of the smartest things you can do to protect yourself online is to enable 2FA on all your accounts that offer it.  I wrote about how to enable it here.   

Be Smarter About Your Passwords
A Password manager (I like LastPass) is a must in 2015.  They help ensure you have amazingly complex and basically uncrackable passwords and helps you to not commit the security sin of password reuse.

Have Good Backups
Do you have good backups?  If someone stole your laptop how much stuff would you lose?

For about $200 you can buy all the tools you need to have great backups.

Buy a 1TB+ USB Drive for local backup (I like this WD Drive).
Signup for a Cloud backup service (I like Dropbox Pro).

Then you have to actually make sure you are backing up to the drive and syncing to the cloud for this to be a good strategy.  I have seen a lot of people buy a backup drive and then never back up to it.

Encrypt Your Important Files
You know those important files you have that you dont want anyone else to see? No, not those pictures… the PDFs of your tax returns… how are you protecting them?

You need to encrypt them (and those pictures) so that if someone does steal your computer they don’t have access.  There are a lot of tools both free (I like Ciphershed) and paid you can pick from and use. 

If you follow these 4 tips your information and accounts will be a lot safer in 2015.

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