Stop blaming ignorance for self-inflicted cyber woes


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This will be the first of a series of articles on points to be cautious of and take the right steps to avoid them. Or implement them better. Each article will contain varied content of benefit for all, as one point may be important for someone and another for someone else.

Intimidation from weak passwords

One of the worst actions you might do is to ignore the huge demand for securing the passwords that you have. Regardless of your ability to memorize or not, you can write them in more than one safe place instead of being like common passwords such as 123456 or 111111, or even the word ‘Password’ itself or other weak passwords that can be guessed in minutes.

The password must not be less than 8 characters and must contain symbols, numbers, letters. Or you can use password creation and saving systems such as LastPass and Google Password.

Intimidation from fake calls and emails

For sure, you have received a group of e-mails entitled “Congratulations, you have won such and such” and then you are asked to send your data or even pay the amount orf shipping and so on. The same is true with SMS messages.

Of course, these are scam messages, and thousands fall into this trap monthly. Therefore, you must be cautious about them and delete them immediately and do not live in the world of Cinderella and start thinking that Lady Luck has smiled on you

Intimidation from home camera technicians

Never trust anyone who installs home camera devices – immediately ask for the mechanism to change the password to access the cameras. Sometimes, weak-spirited people take advantage of accessing your home cameras via the Internet without your knowledge. For that, do not purchase cheap and unknown types of surveillance equipment. Otherwise you will have to face a scandal instead of protection.

Intimidation from not installing antivirus software

Some may be lenient about installing an antivirus for their devices, and our talk here is about Windows and Mac devices. These devices need an antivirus to protect them, and in this way, you also participate in protecting other computers, as the huge number of viruses that are generated every day raises the risks to security. The beautiful thing is that there are some free antivirus programs that give you protection such as Kaspersky, AVG and Avast.

But the first is much stronger and it is preferable to buy the full version, which will cost you just less than Dh10 per month. In such a manner, you can protect your data and time from being lost in repairing your device. Otherwise you may reach the point where your device becomes infected with a ransomware – regret will help at all.

Intimidation from agreeing to browser notifications

Many people are bothered by the large number of notifications they receive from various websites, especially news and advertising ones. The user is often the reason for this. When he accesses most of these sites, he finds the browser asking him that this site wants to send notifications to his device. Most people fall into the error of agreeing to them.

Once it is agreed, breaking waves of messages reach them, some of which may be useful, but many become annoying. So you need to pay close attention to prevent this overwhelming torrent of annoying messages – access the browser settings, then notifications, and cancel sites that annoy you.

Intimidation from taking indecent photos

A lot of people like to photograph themselves using phone cameras. Regardless of the reasons, there is a very dangerous point, which is photographing yourself in indecent positions and photos.

Keeping such photos and preventing anyone from seeing them is considered a near impossible task just because, as we all know, there is no system that is completely secure and there will never be. Some devices allow the recovery of deleted photos from them.

It is true that there are methods used to reduce the opportunity to recover them, such as resetting the phone, then running the camera in video mode at the highest quality level until the phone memory is full, then deleting the video. And repeating the process four to eight times to ensure the difficulty of recovering data.

This process may work in case of wanting to sell your phone, but even this may never help you.


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