“By following a few guiding principles like checking your devices, shopping from trusted sources, using safe purchasing methods, and following basic cyber hygiene like multi-factor authentication, you can drastically improve your online safety when shopping online for gifts this year. Your cyber safety should be treated like your physical safety. Stay vigilant, take steps protect yourself, and trust your instincts. If you see something that doesn’t look right, there’s a good chance it isn’t.” ~ Jen Easterly, Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
It’s imperative that Americans stay safe online this holiday season. In the coming weeks, millions of Americans will be looking for the best deals on the internet. Meanwhile, cyber criminals will be hard at work looking to target online shoppers.
The holiday shopping season is a prime opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of unsuspecting shoppers through fake websites, malicious links, and even fake charities.
Their goal is simple: get your personal and financial information to compromise your data, deploy malicious software, steal your identity, and take your money. But with some simple actions, you can stay safe while you shop online.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is committed to helping Americans better protect themselves online. This holiday shopping season, they want to provide a few easy steps to prevent you from becoming a victim of cyber-crime.
Using strong passwords, updating your software, thinking before you click on suspicious links, and turning on multi-factor authentication are the basics of what they call “cyber hygiene” and will drastically improve your online safety.
Here are the 4 common sense ways to protect yourself online:
- Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) on your accounts and make it much less likely you’ll get hacked. Multi-factor authentication (or two-factor authentication), uses multiple pieces of information to verify your identity. Even if an attacker obtains your password, they may not be able to access your account if it’s protected by this multiple step verification process.
- Update your software. In fact, turn on automatic updates.
- Think before you click. Most successful cyber-attacks start with a phishing email.
- Use strong passwords, and ideally a password manager to generate and store unique passwords.
Before making any online purchases, make sure the device you’re using to shop online is up-to-date. Next, take a look at your accounts and ask, do they each have strong passwords? And even better, if multi-factor authentication is available, are you using it?
Before providing any personal or financial information, make sure that you are interacting with a reputable, established vendor.
Some attackers may try to trick you by creating malicious websites that appear to be legitimate. Always verify the legitimacy before supplying any information. If you’ve never heard of it before, check twice before handing over your information.
References:
- https://www.cisa.gov/shop-safely
- https://www.cisa.gov/news/2022/11/23/cisa-reminds-online-shoppers-stay-vigilant-cyber-threats-holiday-season