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The first of August marks the celebration of World Wide Web Day – a day dedicated to the global network that powers our online activity, creating a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. The World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized the way we communicate, learn, and explore, becoming an integral part of our daily lives. With the importance of the internet only growing stronger, it’s only fitting to honor the World Wide Web with a special day of commemoration. But with the internet comes risks, and it’s important to make sure your family is protected from potential threats. Here are some tips and tricks to keep your family safe online.
Phishing scams are a type of fraud that involves sending emails or other messages that appear to be from a legitimate source. The goal of these messages is to trick users into providing personal information such as passwords, credit card numbers, and bank account details. To protect against phishing scams, teach your family to:
Identity theft is a crime in which someone uses another person’s personal information to commit fraud or other crimes. Teach your family to protect against identity theft by:
A virtual private network (VPN) is a type of technology that provides a secure connection to a private network over the internet. A VPN can help protect your family’s online activity by encrypting the data and hiding your online activity from others. To ensure your family’s online safety, teach them to:
Strong passwords are an important part of online security. Teach your family to create strong passwords and to never share them with anyone. Additionally, use a password manager to store and manage your family’s passwords. A password manager can help by:
To conclude, celebrations on World Wide Web Day allow us to give thanks for the incredible world of knowledge, commerce, entertainment, communication, and innovation that the internet has provided, and continues to provide for us all. By following these tips and tricks, your family can stay safe online and enjoy all the benefits of the internet. Happy World Wide Web Day!
The WWW has enabled us to achieve so many things that were simply impossible before. From the ability to catch up with friends and family across the globe to finding information about virtually any topic, the power of the internet is remarkable. In fact, the World Wide Web has significantly enriched our lives in countless ways.
Did you know that the first-ever image posted on the World Wide Web was a photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, a parody pop band founded by employees at CERN? It was uploaded in 1992 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who used a NeXT computer as the first-ever web server. And although we use the term “surfing the net” regularly, do you know who actually coined the phrase? A librarian by the name of Jean Armour Polly wrote an article titled “Surfing the Internet” in the Wilson Library Bulletin at the University of Minnesota in 1992.
There are many other remarkable facts about the World Wide Web, including its growth over the years. By the start of the year 1993, there were only 50 servers worldwide, but that number had grown to over 500 by October of the same year. Advances in data compression enabled media streaming to happen over the web, which was previously impractical due to high bandwidth requirements for uncompressed media. Although the number of websites online was still small in comparison to today’s figure, notable sites such as Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search were launched in 1994 and 1995, respectively, marking the beginning of web commerce.
On World Wide Web Day, you can celebrate by exploring the capabilities of the internet and discovering how it has changed over the years. Many organizations worldwide host events featuring conversations and interviews with technology leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators. There are also different talks, activities, and discussions online that you can join, allowing you to delve deeper into the history and potential of the World Wide Web. You could even consider running an event at your local business to market the day and celebrate what WWW has done for us all!
The post World Wide Web Day: How to Protect Your Family Online appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Some of the strongest passwords you can use are the ones you don’t have to remember. Strange as that may sound, it’s true, if you use a password manager. A password manager creates and securely stores strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts—and does all the remembering for you. And remembering is the root of the problem when it comes to insecure passwords. Consider how many passwords you have across all your accounts. Then consider the old passwords for accounts and online forums you no longer use, along with all the times you created a password for an online store that you only shopped at once or twice. All those passwords, it’s too much to keep track of, let alone manage. And that leads to insecure passwords. Simple passwords. Or passwords that get used again and again across several accounts. Hackers count on that. They love it when people use simple passwords, reuse passwords, grab passwords out of the dictionary, or base their passwords on their pet names that a hacker can easily glean from a victim’s social media posts. They also love “brute force” tools that help them break into accounts by quickly feeding account logins with thousands of potential passwords in minutes. So when you make your life easier with simple or reused passwords, you make life easier for hackers too. That’s where a password manager comes in. It makes life easy for you to stay secure while still making it tough on hackers—particularly tough with strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts that can you update on a regular basis, which offers some of the strongest protection you have against hackers hijacking your accounts.
First up, let’s look at password practices in general while keeping a few things in mind. Hackers will look for the quickest payday. In some cases they’ll work with a long list of accounts that they’re trying to break into. If a password on that list proves difficult to crack they’ll move on to the next in the hope that it’ll have a poor password that they can easily crack. It’s a sort of hacker economics. There’s often little incentive for them to spend extra time on a strong password when there are plenty of weak ones in the mix. So what do poor passwords look like? Here are a few examples:
On the flip side, here’s what a strong password looks like:
Long, complex, unique, and updated, all described as above—how do you manage all that without creating a string of gobbledygook that you’ll never remember? You can do so with a passphrase. A phrase will give you those 12 or more characters mentioned above, and with a couple extra steps, can turn into something quite unique and complex. Here’s a three-step example:
Now you have a password that you can remember with a little practice, one that still challenges the tools that hackers use for cracking passwords.
When you consider the number of accounts you need to protect, creating strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts can get time consuming. Further, updating them regularly can get more time consuming still. That’s where a password manager comes in. A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for your accounts. These will take the form of a string of random numbers, letters, and characters. They will not be memorable, but the manager does the memorizing for you. You only need to remember a single password to access the tools of your manager. A strong password manager also stores your passwords securely. Ours protects your passwords by scrambling them with AES-256, one of the strongest encryption algorithms available. Only you can decrypt and access your information with the factors you choose. Additionally, our password manager uses MFA—you’ll be verified by at least two factors before being signed in.
Whether it’s the passwords you’ve created or the master password for your password manager, consider making an offline list of them. This will protect access to your accounts if you ever forget them. Be sure to store this list in a safe, offline place—recognizing that you want to protect it from physical theft. A locking file cabinet is one option and a small fireproof safe yet more secure. A password manager is just part of your password security solution. For example, you’ll also want to use comprehensive online protection software to prevent you from following links in phishing attacks designed to steal your account login information. The same goes for malicious links that can pop up in search. Online protection software can steer you clear of those too. In some cases, bad actors out there will simply shop on the dark web for username and password combos that were stolen from data breaches. An identity monitoring service such as our own can alert you if your information ends up there. It can monitor the dark web for your personal info, including email, government IDs, credit card and bank account info, and more. Ours provides early alerts and guidance for the next steps to take if your data is found on the dark web, an average of 10 months ahead of similar services.
A password manager takes the pain out of passwords. It creates strong, unique passwords for every account you have. That includes banking, social media, credit cards, online shopping, financial services, or what have you. The entire lot of it. And remember, remembering is the thing with passwords. Hackers hope you’ll get lazy with your passwords by creating simple ones, reusing others, or some combination of the two because that makes it easier to remember them. That’s the beauty of a password manager. It does the remembering for you, so you simply go on your way as you go online. Safely.
The post The Strongest Passwords and the Best Way to Create (and Remember) Them appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Imagine that you want to pull up a certain file on your computer. You click on the file and suddenly a notice flashes on your screen saying your computer is compromised and to get your files back, you need to pay up. This is known as ransomware, a nasty type of malware that is no longer reserved for multimillionaires and corporations. Cybercriminals are holding hostage computer files and sensitive personal documents of ordinary people for their own financial gain.
Here’s everything you need to know about how ransomware makes it on to your devices and seven digital safety habits you can start today to prevent it from happening to you.
Ransomware infects connected devices – smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktops – when the device owners unknowingly click on links or popups that have malicious software embedded within them.
Phishing attempts are a common vehicle for spreading ransomware. The cybercriminal veils their malicious links in emails, texts, or social media direct messages that urge a quick response and threaten dire consequences. For example, a phisher may impersonate a bank and demand the innocent recipient click on a link to recover a large sum of money. Instead, the link directs not to an official bank website, but to a malware download page. From there, the ransomware software takes hold and allows the cybercriminal to stalk and lock your most important files.
If a cybercriminal reaches out to you and notifies you that they have your files hostage, do not engage with them and never pay the ransom. Even if you do pay the ransom, there’s no guarantee that the criminal will release your files. They’re a criminal after all, and you cannot trust them. Giving in and paying ransoms bolsters the confidence of cybercriminals that their schemes are successful, thus they’ll perpetuate the scam.
Remain calm and immediately disconnect your ransomware-infected device from the Wi-Fi. This will prevent the program from jumping from one device to another device connected to the same network. Then, on another device, visit the No More Ransom Project. This initiative, supported by McAfee, has a repository of advice and code that may rid your device of the malicious program. Additionally, report the event to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. An agent may be able to help you unlock your device or advise you on how to proceed.
The best way to prepare for ransomware is to prevent it from happening in the first place. These seven online habits are a great way to keep your devices and the valuable personally identifiable information they store from falling into the hands of cybercriminals.
A cybercriminal has no leverage if your device doesn’t house anything of value. Back up your most important files every few months, either to the cloud or save them onto a hard drive. This way, if you do get a ransomware infection, you can wipe your device and reinstall your files from the backup. Backups protect your data, and you won’t be tempted to reward the malware authors by paying a ransom.
When updating your credentials, you should always ensure that your password is strong and unique. It’s dangerous to reuse the same password across accounts because all it takes to put your accounts at risk is for one data breach to leak your password onto the dark web. It’s nearly impossible to memorize all your different password and username combinations, so entrust a password manager to store them for you.
Two or multi-factor authentication provides an extra layer of security, as it requires multiple forms of verification to enter an online account. For instance, you’ll be asked to verify your identity through a one-time code sent to a cellphone or to answer a security question in tandem with a correct password. This additional step in the login process deters ransomware plots because if you store your important documents behind a multi-factor authentication-protected cloud program, the criminal has nothing of value to hold hostage.
Don’t click on links or respond to emails, social media direct messages, and texts from people you don’t know. This is important since phishers often trick people into downloading malware and ransomware software through disguised links.
Using a security extension on your web browser is one way to browse more safely. McAfee WebAdvisor, for instance, alerts you when you’ve ventured onto risky sites that could harbor malware. Websites that claim to have free TV shows, movies, and software are among the riskiest.
Public Wi-Fi networks – like those at libraries, coffee shops, hotels, and airports – are often not secure. Since anyone can log on, you can’t always trust that everyone on the network has good intentions. Cybercriminals often hop on public networks and digitally eavesdrop on the devices connected to it. So, you can either avoid public Wi-Fi altogether and only access the internet through 5G, or you can enable a virtual private network. A VPN is a truly private network that encrypts your internet traffic, making you completely anonymous online.
Don’t ignore your devices’ notifications to update your software. Keeping your software up to date is an excellent way to deter cybercriminals from forcing their way onto your device. Software updates usually include critical security patches that close any holes that a ransomware plot could squeeze through.
To boost your peace of mind, opt for an extra layer of security with a solution like McAfee+ Ultimate, which includes up to $25,000 in ransomware coverage. McAfee+ Ultimate also includes a VPN, password manager, and safe browsing extension to keep your online comings and goings private.
The post 7 Tips to Protect Your Devices and Private Information from Ransomware appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Password protection is one of the most common security protocols available. By creating a unique password, you are both proving your identity and keeping your personal information safer. However, when every account you have requires a separate password, it can be an overwhelming task. While you should be concerned about the safety of your data, you also want to avoid the frustration of forgetting your password and being blocked from the information you need. However, the benefits of using strong, unique passwords outweigh the occasional inconvenience.
The main benefit of a strong password is security. Hackers work quickly when they are trying to access accounts. They want to steal as much information as they can in as short a time as possible. This makes an account with a strong password less inviting because cracking the code is much more involved.
A strong password also limits the damage that hackers can do to your personal accounts. A common strategy involves cracking the passwords of less secure sites with limited personal information. The hackers hope that they can use the password from your gym membership app to access information in your online banking account. Strong password protection prevents this situation.
When someone is registering an online account, it can be tempting to blaze through the password process. In order to move quickly, there are several poor password practices that people employ.
A password is considered strong when it is difficult for a hacker to crack it quickly. Sophisticated algorithms can run through many password combinations in a short time. A password that is long, complex and unique will discourage attempts to break into your accounts.
If you want a password that is memorable but strong, you can easily turn a phrase into a layered, complex password. In this process, it is important to note that you should not use personal information that is available online as part of your phrase.
Now, you have a password that you can remember while challenging the algorithms hackers use.
When you consider the number of accounts you need to protect, coming up with a properly layered password is a time-consuming task. Even if you are able to decide on a memorable phrase, there are just too many accounts that need passwords. A password manager is a helpful tool to keep you safe while you are online. It acts as a database for all of your passwords. Each time you create a new code, it stores it so that you can automatically enter it later. You only need to remember a single password to access the tools of your manager.
Most managers can also do the work of creating complex, layered passwords for your accounts. These will be a string of random numbers, letters and characters. They will not be memorable, but you are relying on the manager to do the memorizing. These machine-generated passwords are especially helpful for accounts you rarely access or that do not hold significant information.
For critical accounts like your bank account or a work-related account, it can be helpful to keep an offline list of your passwords. Complex passwords are meant to be difficult to remember. You may recall the phrase but not all the detailed changes that make it layered. Keeping a document on a zip drive or even in a physical paper file or journal will allow you to access your information if your hardware fails or you are switching to a new system.
Cracking passwords is just one of the strategies hackers use to steal information. In addition to using strong passwords, it is important to employ comprehensive security software. Strong passwords will help protect your online accounts. Strong overall security will keep your hardware and network safe from danger.
The post Strong Password Ideas to Keep Your Information Safe appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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