What could be worse than losing your tablet or smartphone
and having somebody access your social media accounts, business information,
and contacts? Well, OK, identity
theft. And that could happen, too. But not if you’re a bit proactive. Here are just a few basic defenses for you.
My first line of defense is a simple one. My tablet, laptop and smartphone all have a
screen lock. My smartphone auto locks
after 2 minutes of inactivity (which admittedly is sometimes a real pain), my
tablet locks after 5 minutes, and I manually lock my laptop anytime I step away
from it. Yup, rest room break, out for
lunch, meeting with a colleague – it gets locked. Luckily, you can set the time interval for
the auto lock to whatever you prefer.
The important thing is that if you lose your device (or it gets stolen),
it will be harder for somebody to access your services and accounts.
Think about social media. On my smartphone and my tablet, I
stay logged in to certain sites unless I specifically click ‘log out’. Many don’t because they’d be logging in a
hundred times a day. Lose the phone and anybody now can post in my name,
solicit my friends, and in general cause havoc with my life.
Something that still amazes me is the number of people that
do not back up their devices. Please, back
up your data. With cloud storage
this is so easy. Afraid of the
cloud? Buy an external drive and let it
run at night. Storage has never been
cheaper and you won’t go into a cold sweat if your device gets trashed.
Get and use a quality anti-virus software. These programs have developed so much that
they detect bad web sites, dangerous files sent to you anonymously and many
other threats that you’ve not heard of yet.
I opt to pay for a well known package that protects three devices for an
annual subscription. That is ‘cheap
insurance’ to me. Some free programs are
good, too, but lack all of the features.
Keep your software up to date. It’s a royal pain when your operating system
wants to constantly ‘update’. Often that
requires a reboot, at least on the laptop.
Still, these updates often take care of newly discovered security threats
as well as fixing old bugs, so it really is worth it to do the update. You don’t have to do it immediately if you’re
in the middle of something, but do it sooner rather than later.
Be careful of the apps you install and read the
installation prompts! I recently had an alert to update two applications,
one needed to let my web browser operate properly, and another program that I
use multiple times daily. On
installation, one wanted to change my ‘preferred browser’ to something
different and the second one wanted to install web browser ‘tool bar’ that I
didn’t need. Often the tool bar
installation changes your web home page and many other preferences. A simple click on the ‘decline’ box was all
it took to not let that happen. Entertainment apps in particular can install
unwanted features.
Beware the “crazy good offer’. Usually it’s something like, “for our 125th
anniversary we’re giving away 125 bottles or cases of ‘x’ totally free”. Or cartons of cigarettes. It could be anything. The link you click on has a similar name but
is not the company web site. These folks
are fishing (phishing) for your personal info or for marketing data. If it sounds too good to be true, it
probably is. Keep your antennae up!
And don’t nibble on the bait.
If you have real estate questions, you can contact me at
anytime for straight answers or referrals to somebody that can help better than
I.
image courtesy of Stuart Miles/freedigitalphotos.net
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