Tips for surviving on the Internet in times of pandemic

With recent pandemic situation, all of us were pushed to give a step ahead toward the technological revolution or as you want to call, the point of this is right now we are easily 70% of our time on the internet and threats on it are rising although we do not see it, problems such as malware, spoofing, the famous ransomware and other kind problems that common users probably do not know about it. For that reason, I write this post, to give certain kind of tools that can be useful to keep us save when we are browsing on the internet.

The first advice that I am going to give you is to check if you mail or password had been leaked on internet. To check this, go to the following URL (www.haveibeenpwned.com) and put your mail. In the case that your mail has been leaked, I suggest you change your password. Other related advice, is to not use the same password for all your accounts on the internet. I know learning a lot of passwords can be difficult. For this reason, we should use a key password manager as (www.keepass.info) it is useful and safe, and you only have to learn one password. By other hand, do not save you password on the browser, this password can be easily stolen. There are a lot of examples how can those passwords can be stolen.

This advice is a complement of the first one, to keep safe your accounts use two factor authentication (2FA). This way you can prevent unwanted intrusions on your accounts, you can use our cellphones as 2FA or a small key called Yubi Key which is a little USB that can easily be configured (on this link you can see it in depth www.yubico.com).

More than 60% use Google Chrome as default browser for their routines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers), such as checking the email, paying taxes or buying something and similar things that are normal to us. The problem is when the browser begins to track all of steps that we take on internet. This could become annoying and intrusive. To solve this problem, you can use a browser such as Brave or Firefox as they give an extra of privacy, block the all the trackers on internet and consume less RAM that google chrome. Always is good to save a little bit of memory.

If you are the kind of person who connects to every open Wi-Fi that you see, you should know that certain kind of networks could be compromised and all the data that you are pushing on internet that could be seen by suspicious people, whose sole interest is steal your data. For that reason, I recommend user a VPN to encrypt all the traffic that is posting on internet. On the following link you can compare the different VPNs available an choose the right according your necessities. www.top10bestvpn.com

This advice is simple, take a backup of your data, we cannot know when our pc or hard drive / pen drives will crash or get infected with a ransomware, this meaning that all of our information will be lost. For this I suggest a back in L architecture, where you have a cloud services, an external hard drive and the storage of your own computer. With this structure we ensure the back up of our data. In case that some point of architecture fail we still have 2 back up points to recover our data.

My final advice: do not download all files that you see on internet, those files could have virus. The way to check it is uploading the file on this website www.virustotal.com this website checks the file to ensure that is clean. What be aware that all files that you upload on this website other people can check it so do not upload files with personal information.

I hope these advices were useful to all of you.