5 everyday security practices you need to get right

We often pay a lot of attention to how secure our credit card PINs and bank passwords are, but forget about regular, everyday things we do that might put our security at risk. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. This means that to keep confidential information safe, you need to make sure the rest of your credentials are also safe. This post is my attempt to help you cultivate better everyday security practices.

1. Strong, unique passwords across different services

This one gets repeated a lot, and for good reason. One breached password can cause a world of damage depending on which one it is. Ideally, each of your passwords should be unique, long and strong and include a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. This is hard to remember so the best way to do it is using a password manager such as Bitwarden.

Avoid using the login with Facebook/Google option on sites, especially if those accounts are really important to you, such as on LinkedIn or Twitter. This is because, if the Facebook or Google account you’re using for the login is compromised, it will automatically compromise the sites you’re using those accounts for login as well. Using this option might seem more convenient, but it really is not a good practice, not to mention it ties all your activity back to one account making you very easy to trace across the internet.

2. Router Password

It is a common belief that hackers can only access your data from the server i.e by breaching the server of a site you’re visiting, or if you simply give your information to a sketchy website. It is assumed that the bad actor always attacks at the destination. This assumption is made because attacking the destination server is the easiest way the hacker can access the data from a large number of people the fastest.

However, if you have weak router passwords, you are the weakest link in the chain. Weak router passwords make it easy for hackers to monitor just about anything on your network because even with encryption, the password becomes very guessable. Computers that are connected to the network, domains each of these computers are connecting to, their operating systems, data stored in each of the computers, all of this becomes available to a hacker with scary ease.

There are three things you can do to strengthen your router’s security:

• Change the administrator password to your router. By default, it is usually set to something generic like ‘admin’ or ‘system’ or just blank. Changing this will lock access to your router’s settings such as changing the names of wireless networks or their passwords to third parties. You can find instructions to change this in your router’s user manual.
• Use strong passwords for the networks themselves. Avoid using something like a family member’s name or what they’re set up with by default (it’s usually something horribly insecure like 123456789)
• This last one is for people willing to tweak around the settings a little bit. Set your wifi password encryption to AES. It is 256-bit encryption. The same standard is used in password managers and military communications. If your password itself is strong, it will take an extremely determined hacker to crack it.

Doing this will ensure that no sketchy person sitting out in your apartment parking lot can monitor you and your family’s internet activity, or even worse, watch YouTube on the wifi that you are paying for.

3. Do not save passwords on browsers

You’ve probably seen your browser offer to save your passwords when you log in on websites. Don’t take it up on the offer. They aren’t stored with the level of security with which a password manager saves them. Saving passwords on browsers is not safe, not to mention they aren’t synced unless you’re logged into the browser. My solution here is once again to just use something like Bitwarden to manage your passwords.

4. Use a strong antivirus software

This one is especially for the Windows users out there, but also everyone else. Invest in a strong antivirus software like Kaspersky or Bitdefender. Malware can be a huge pain, and antivirus software keeps them in check and also keep smaller vulnerabilities patched up, without you having to do much work other than installing the antivirus itself.

As for my fellow Linux users, it can be easy to fall into the misunderstanding that Linux is impenetrable. This is not the case. Linux has much less malware written for it because it doesn’t have a large enough, vulnerable user base that would make writing malware specifically for it worthwhile. However, some issues affect Linux systems as well and using tools such as Rootkit Hunter or ChkrootKit can address a lot of them.

5. Download software only from trusted sources

While downloading software always make sure of the following two things, in this order:

1. The software you are downloading is from a verified developer. Never download applications from unknown sources or applications whose origin is unknown.
2. If the software itself is verifiable and trustworthy, make sure you download it directly from the developer’s website or a verified package repository(for Linux users).

If possible, try to verify the SHA256 checksum for the copy of the software that you have downloaded and make sure it matches what is given on the official website. This is highly recommended because this means it is extremely unlikely that your copy of the software has been tampered with.

I hope you found this list useful. I had initially compiled a list of 10 ways but this post ended up being too long, so I will be covering 5 more in the next one. This is a continuation of my previous post, and probably just one of many posts on this topic.

If you like my content, go ahead and subscribe to my mailing list :)