If you are online, you can get hacked. If you have any digital profiles, you can get hacked. If you have an email address that people contact you at, you can get hacked. There are so many different ways to get hacked that you need to have at least a loose understanding of how they work. Once you know how people are getting into trouble in the virtual world, you can take steps to avoid it.
So what are a few of these common traps that people fall into? Often, if you see links to pop-culture items, evil forces are trying to get information about you. There are tons of email scams that are constantly shuffling around the world. Anyone that uses bad password practices is susceptible to getting hacked. And if you don’t shred your physical mail, some hackers even go so far as to look for information in your garbage!
Popular Culture Links
As you are surfing the Internet, you’ll see lots of advertisements for things that seem readily accessible or popular. These are classic ways to get people to click on things that may be dangerous. As an example, there might be an advertisement telling you where to get music for free. Some of these are legitimate ways to showcase public domain music. Other times, they will link to sites where you can end up downloading viruses or other nasty computer Trojans.
Email Scams
You can look at listings of common email scams and see just how sophisticated some hackers are getting. You have probably at least seen some of these in your inbox in the last decade or so. But, for the uninitiated, some of these look like legitimate requests for information. Especially since hackers started being able to emulate the look of messages coming from banks or financial institutions, the danger factor has gone way up.
Bad Password Practices
You should always use password best practices. If at all possible, you should use a password manager. If you don’t follow those two pieces of advice, all of the security in the world isn’t going to help. A hacker can simply log into whatever profile you have available and start causing trouble from inside. Two-factor authentication is getting rid of some of this problem, but people are still very lax about easy password use in some cases, which can snowball into identity theft.
Physical Mail
Do you shred all of your private documents before you throw them away? If not, that’s another way that hackers can get your private information. With your birth date, address, and information found in some of your physical mail, they can do a lot of damage by pretending to be you later on.
