Cyber Security Tips for the Holiday Season

We all know how important it is to use the internet safely, but during the holiday season, it’s even more important to protect your sensitive information from cyber criminals. With a 31% increase in fraud attempts during the holidays, frequent online shoppers and internet users should consider taking a proactive approach to protecting their computers, online files, financial accounts, and identity information.

5 Tips for your Online Security During the Holiday Season

1. Update Your Computer

Although it seems obvious, among daily computer users, nearly 66% of them will delay or forget to install suggested software updates -- even when it’s marked “securitycritical”. Setting up automatic updates is the best way to avoid the inconvenient reboot, and ensures your software is bug free and hack resistant.

2. Protect Your Network

The easiest way to protect your internet connection is to use a virtual private network (VPN). VPNs create an encrypted connection protecting your data from other network users or cybercriminals. For tech savvy individuals, you can check out this information on advanced network security.

3. Secure Your Cloud Data

No matter what time of year it is, protecting the information stored within your online cloud is essential. From sensitive client information to personal data, today we use our clouds to store almost everything. However, it’s possible that the transfer of data in and out of the cloud could be vulnerable to attack-- especially if you’re using an unprotected network. However, cloud encryption software like ours can give you peace of mind while accessing your online data.

4. Avoid Password Duplication

When creating a new account, or accessing a frequently used one, it’s important to use entirely new and unique passwords to prevent and avoid compromising other accounts using the same password. Incorporating numbers, letters, and special characters into your password makes it much harder to guess or hack. If you use unique passwords for every account, a hacked password cannot be applied to your other accounts. Remembering multiple unique passwords can be tough, so consider installing a secure password manager such as this one from Sticky Password.

5. Defend Your Identity Information

Using all of the above security strategies, a proactive individual is far less likely to be the victim of credit fraud or identity theft. However, detecting compromised information can be difficult, and unless you frequently check your credit report and billing statements for unknown use or surprises, it’s possible to go unnoticed. To prevent this, consider enrolling in an identity theft protection and monitoring service to defend yourself against future cyberattacks and fraud.

Boxcryptor – Security for Your Cloud

Boxcryptor is a software Made in Germany that allows data to be encrypted automatically before it is stored in the cloud. More than 20 of the popular cloud storage services can be used with Boxcryptor. We encrypt your files using state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption technology. Through zero knowledge encryption, no one else (including us as the provider) has access to the encrypted files except the registered user.

Of course, here at Boxcryptor, we are concerned about cybersecurity and data privacy all year round. But the holidays are a great opportunity to once again intensively deal with the settings of your devices, your update behavior, and habits.

The advantage of using Boxcryptor for your cloud security: Once it is set up, the encryption runs in the background. This means, if you take a little time over the holidays to get started with Boxcryptor, you have a good set-up for the protection of your data in the New Year.