How to stay safe from Cybercrime this pandemic — personal guide for the netizen — Part 1

Covid-19 has brought out the best in people — medics working overtime to help hospitals handle the surge in admissions, communities helping the less fortunate, neighbors who’ve seen eye to eye spoken helping with errands and so on. Unfortunately, it has also brought the worst out of some people. Cybercrime took on a whole new shift from the ARPANET project days. And now since the social media boom starting with Myspace, Orkut, Facebook and so on has opened up a field day era for the bad guys online. Now the pandemic has created the perfect online cyberattack range. Plenty of personally indentifiable information and supported related information online and plenty of brainy bad guys who’re short of money.

People lock their gates and install surveillance cameras to guard their home but on the other hand, the digital door of their home is wide open to anyone who’d like to walk in and take anything they want — provided they do a little research and connect the dots.

The level of ignorance about Cybersecurity among today’s netizens sends chills down my spine. I just don’t want to even think about the possibilities.

As a cybersecurity and privacy advocate, I’d recommend you do a couple of things that will shut the door to the bad guys, atleast your front door that’s wide open, your digital footprint on social media.

There’s plenty other aspects where you need to secure yourself online — but that’s for another article.

Myth: Including my birthday on social platforms is no problem. (As long as I don’t include my year of birth)

Never include your birthday — day, month or year. Let’s say you include a wrong year and just include the day and the month just so people can wish you and that doesn’t harm anyone, think again. I can find out your school and college connections and figure out your year of birth. OK!! Fine!! So what would anyone do with it? Well, at the least I could sell your information to a company that produces products that people in your age group use. At worst, I could find your bank account details and provide your birthday to impersonate your identity. Is this worth the umpteen “Happy Birthday, Mike”s from the 800 odd people you hardly remember? You choose.

Action: Delete your date of birth or change it to a wrong one — all three fields.

Myth: I need to include my full name so people can find me. How would anyone know I even exist?

Honestly, people other than your family don’t care. So, come to terms with it. The rest of the world use that information you provide for their benefit at your expense. So, think again!

Building your online presence in terms of your expertise in understanding a particular hobby or your profession is completely different. That’s definitely encouraged. That’s how you make use of the social media boom for your benefit. But even there, refrain from putting up information about who your mom is, who your siblings are, your favourite movie, your next vacation and so on!

As the lines are getting more and more obscure between personal and professional aspects, You need to have a keen eye to differentiate between the two. There is a difference. Including this information online is a big no no. Your full name, your siblings, Your house address, your children’s photographs, your parents name, your favorite restaurant, your church and so on.

Action point: Edit your full name. Thomas Edison can be just Thomas T or better yet Tom T

Never use similar handles in different social accounts (eileen1956 for facebook, twitter, instagram and youtube).

Don’t ever connect accounts. If you’ve already connected accounts, you can remove them here. Just remove the username and press save.

That’s like saying I’ll keep my hall door open..so you can come in via my front door and then exit through the backdoor. Limiting access to each room is important, and so it is for social media accounts. Even if one account gets compromised, you’ll save the other.

This works differently for professional social networking. I think I already mentioned that! For professionals, they’d want followers on all platforms so they try and maintain the link between all. But if you’re a normal netizen, don’t imitate that behaviour, unless you want to invite trouble!

Follow me for more articles on this topic…and hopefully at the end of this pandemic, you will own the key to your digital world!