Protecting Yourself

Knowing how to protect yourself from becoming a victim of cybercrime is essential knowledge, especially for those using social networking websites. There are thousands of hackers all over the world out to get personal information about individuals and use it for criminal activity. Whether it’s in a form of identity theft, stealing you password for credit card information or invading your personal space to ruin your reputation, there are several ways in which one can make precautions to avoid becoming a victim of these cybercrimes. Social networking websites have created a gateway for cybercrime making it easier for criminals to obtain personal information and use it for criminal activity. Doing little things when surfing online and communicating over social networking websites can have a huge impact in avoiding becoming a victim of cybercrime. Things like adjusting your privacy settings to only allow your friends see your information and limiting the amount of information you share on social networking websites are essential steps in preventing yourself from being a victim of identity theft. Be selective in the friend requests you accept because there are thousands of fake profiles created by hackers in order to access personal information of other users. With concern to password protection, try to avoid simple passwords like “123123” or individual birth dates. Simple passwords and combinations are easy to crack as hackers have several programs which attempt to use every combination of numbers and letters to breach user’s profiles. Creating a difficult combination of both letters and numbers can help avoid easy access to your accounts and personal information that you post online. Try not to use the same password for everything, by mixing it up it keeps hackers from beings able to access everything so easily. Keeping your information completely private is almost impossible, especially over the internet. Thousands of people each day send and receive information and connect with each other world wide that it’s almost impossible to keep everyone from seeing your information. The best way to protect yourself from being a victim of a cybercrime is to just limit the amount of personal and valuable information that you post online. They less information that you post on the information the less hackers have to work with if they try to infiltrate your personal information. Taking the proper precautions to protect yourself from hackers and online criminal activity to avoid being a victim of this growing concern.