In today’s world, everyone is connected digitally. The digital revolution has given us the flexibility to connect, learn, and continue our business whilst on the move. However, as we continue to rely on technology, cybercriminals are increasingly becoming sophisticated. Daily, cybercriminals are using various methods to trick people into revealing personal and business information.

To truly stay in control of your information, focus on maintaining privacy, protecting the data, and staying in control of it. That’s why we have a roundup of how you can keep your data protected, maintain privacy, and control to boost your confidence whilst staying digitally connected.

Privacy Protection

Privacy protection involves the act of keeping information you’d rather keep private from falling into the hands of advertisers, fraudsters, and others who seek to use your personal information for their benefit.

To keep your online privacy, it just takes a few changes to your regular surfing, email, and social media routine to improve your online privacy.

Let’s start by thinking about your social media habits. Are you someone who posts everything about yourself, such as what you did throughout the day, your past, where you are, documents that show your full name, birth date, and address? If that’s the case, then start to detoxify what you put online. Though it might be a great way to keep your loved ones updated on what you are doing, unfortunately, cybercriminals love every minute of it as well.

Cybercriminals can get enough personal information about you in minutes of snooping to impersonate you or target you for a social engineering attempt. Limit what you share on social media and limit your follower and friend lists to those you know in real life to keep your personal information private.

Use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to secure your privacy. By encrypting your location and connections, a VPN allows you to stay entirely anonymous online. Even though some believe going into an incognito mode for browsing is safer, only a VPN can guarantee your anonymity. When you log out of a session in Incognito mode, also known as private mode, your browsing history, cookies, and site data are deleted from your device.

While incognito mode stops others from snooping on your browser history if they obtain access to your device, you’re still vulnerable to fraudsters interfering with your personal information.

When using a public network, such as those found in coffee shops, libraries, and transportation hubs, a VPN is very vital. Cybercriminals frequently lurk on unprotected Wi-Fi networks, listening in on customers paying bills or doing online shopping to obtain their credentials.

In addition, purchase antivirus software and enable automatic updates so that you are always using the safest, up-to-date version.

Identity Protection

Nowadays the number of identity theft cases has increased. Identity theft can refer to a variety of events including:

  • Synthetic identity fraud: Fraudulent use of a false identity When a criminal steals a Social Security Number and assigns it to a new identity, this is the most common sort of identity theft.
  • New account fraud: When a criminal successfully takes personal identifying information (PII) and financial information and utilizes the victim’s excellent credit score to open new credit cards, utility accounts, mobile device accounts, and so on, this is known as new account fraud.
  • Account takeover fraud: Account takeover fraud occurs when a cybercriminal steals banking credentials and then adds themselves as authorized users, granting them access to the victim’s bank account and a credit card. Fortunately, because of the widespread use of EMV chip readers, this form of fraud is on the decline.
  • Medical Identity theft: Medical identity thieves imitate patients to acquire access to their prescription prescriptions and have the identity theft victim pay for their medical treatment.
  • Business Identity theft: Business identity theft, which is frequently targeted at small business owners, occurs when a cybercriminal tries to open new credit lines in the business’ name or sends consumers false bills and collects the payments themselves.

Any of these fraud acts lead to inconvenience, which impacts your finances, credit score, and ability to obtain loans, mortgage, or future credit cards. Protecting your Personal Identifiable Information is a key approach to keeping your identity safe. To continue to stay updated, keep up with the news, and take prompt action if a corporate stops PII that get hacked.

Even if you do everything right, a cybercriminal may still gain access to your personal information, such as through a breach at a company with whom you have an account. You might want to consider signing up for an identity protection service that monitors the dark web and notifies you to strange activities that could signal identity theft.

Data Protection

In the digital space, protecting your data is vital. Whether it’s for business or personal. One of the best methods to keep your data protected is through the process of encryption. Encryption is the first step towards enhanced data security. However, there are many different levels of encryption.

There are new standards for protecting information. Security initiatives must offer three critical areas to safeguard data:

  • Intelligent Visibility: Companies need to be able to maintain control of data no matter where it is stored or shared. With that control comes complete visibility of where assets are and what is happening to them.
  • Proactive Mitigation: Companies require effective endpoint and security applications to enforce security at a scale.
  • Continuous Control: Companies must use complete security solutions to build policies, maximize asset safeguard and comply with regulatory rules.

Data is confidential to an individual and businesses. It is the lifeline of any business, and that’s why it needs protecting. Siccura was developed with a single mission to help individuals and businesses maintain a private and secure digital life. In simpler terms, it’s a suite of solutions that provide complete protection of any type of data and communication, security, and more importantly ultimate control of the data. So, no matter where personal or business information rests, the owners are in control

What’s more, at Siccura we understand that data protection solutions can only go so far. That’s why we’ve developed Siccura Cybershield, an awareness program developed to change the behaviors of employees so that they become aware of the digital risks, and stay one step ahead before attacks strike.