Are you Digitally Secure?

By Tina Zawila

We don’t think twice about locking our home and our car, or protecting our wallet, but what about our digital identity?  How do you even know if it’s “locked”? 

In May 2017 the US Federal Trade Commission leaked a database of 100 fake customers and found it only took nine minutes for criminals to attempt to access the information and use it to commit fraud.  

This is a problem that is only intensifying as our digital usage increases.

Recently, a client shared their experience of internet banking fraud with us, where they had $20,000 stolen from their accounts through no fault of their own.  They were using the bank’s recommended security protocols, however their mobile phones were hacked and access gained to their internet banking.   While they were compensated for their financial loss via the bank, they also lost access to their accounts for several days, spent hours on the telephone trying to sort things out, and received a $4,000 telephone bill!

So what can you do to protect yourself?  While there are a host of security measures that you can implement, let’s start with your passwords.  Unfortunately over the years we have successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.  Instead of the common eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters, it is now recommended that we use four random common words such as “correct horse battery staple” as a password.  It has been estimated that modern technology can hack the eight character password in 3 days, whereas it could take 550 years to crack the four word password.

I encourage you to take some time to consider your personal digital security and implement measures to protect yourself.  Think before you sign up for that new app or log on to that new website.  Cyber criminals are knocking on doors constantly looking for one that is unlocked or ajar – make sure it’s not yours.

At Sothertons we are passionate about improving and protecting your financial future.  Call us on 4972 1300.