With our lives becoming more and more integrated with technology, it is more important than ever to protect yourself and your loved ones online.
Identity theft is a common anxiety in businesses and homes across America. Which makes sense seeing as reports of Cybercrime in general has gone up 300% in the past six months. Reports also state that during the holidays, the chances for data breaches and identity theft increase dramatically.
So, it makes sense that we mark December as National Identity Theft Awareness month. It’s a good time to brush up on your skills at identifying fraud and potential places where some of your information can slip through the cracks.
Fighting back Against Cybercrime
If you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of dealing with cybercrime, you know that an ounce of prevention is worth way more than the hours you’ll spend on the phone with customer support as you cancel credit cards, change passwords, and manage your data.
With identity protection services like Aura Identity Guard, protecting yourself online is as easy as simply signing up through our site. Identity Guard works by using IBM’s Watson AI to comb through the dark web and check to see if any of your important information ends up for sale.
Watson cross checks to make sure your email, passwords, banking, social security, and any other personal information don’t end up on anywhere you don’t want them. Watson also constantly monitors your public records to make sure they aren’t changed without you knowing and pays close attention to transactions within your account.
If you’re interested in signing up for Aura Identity Guard, click here to learn more!
Quick Tips
While Aura Identity Guard is an excellent tool to counter identity theft, there are also a surprising number of things you can do on your own to make sure you’re staying safe, especially during the holidays.
1. The first and most prominent is to always make sure you’re paying close attention to the kinds of sites you’re on, and where you’re putting your information.
While the icon pictured here at the beginning of our URL isn’t always a sign that a site is 100% safe, it is a good benchmark for starting. You can always click the symbols at the beginning of URLs and get more information about your online connection.
2. Another thing you can do to verify that you’re on the correct site is to click on the URL itself and look closely at what your browser says.
For example, with SDPEBA, by clicking on the URL it reveals that this site has an HTTPS connection type. Other sites might just have an HTTP connection type, meaning they do not encrypt your connection.
Most common sites have an HTTPS connection, but spoofed sites usually don’t. Here’s what going onto a HTTP site looks like on google chrome.
3. While you’re looking at your URL, you should also check to make sure you’re not on a spoofed site, which is a website designed to look like a website you might commonly go to. Spoofed sites often add characters or hyphens to the URL to trick you. While this used to be common for larger sites like Amazon or the Google Play Store, identity thieves and spoofers occasionally target smaller businesses like local banks or employee login sites.
4. And finally, use common sense. If the deals are too good to be true, it the product images are clearly fake, if the descriptions are filled with typos. Then, that site is probably just trying to take advantage of you.
As cybercriminals get more and more advanced, users need to meet that bar and become dedicated to ensuring their safety online. We need to be careful about where and when we give our information, and we need to be proactive in the case something does go wrong.
Stay safe and be cautious by following those four tips and, if you’re interested, sign up for Aura Identity Guard to make sure you’re protected while online.
If you want to learn more about Aura’s Identity Guard, click here to watch a webinar we hosted with Scott Hudson, Aura’s Senior Vice President of Sales and if you want to read about how you can help prevent cyberbullying and protect your kids online, click here.