In a recent post I shared my story on how I almost lost it all. I have learned a lot since that experience and I’ve compiled a list of 9 ways to protect your online assets in an attempt to help save you from my close call. I hope you put these lessons into practice as they’ve certainly helped me from having anything stolen from me since my last run in with a social engineering hacker.
1. Use different user names and passwords for every single website you own, publisher program you work with and even forums you attend!
This one should be obvious advice, but if you use the same user name and password for various websites you’re increasing the chances that unauthorized users could gain access to your accounts. If you don’t want to try and remember a bunch of passwords try using a password management program.
2. Change passwords when you sell websites.
If you pay attention to my first piece of advice than you won’t have to worry about this, but it’s important to change your passwords when you sell your websites. You don’t want to complete a website transfer only to find out you that you forgot the SQL user in your database is using a password you used for the forum you sold the website through (yah I nearly did that once).
3. Use a Paper Shredder.
If you are throwing away paper based credit card statements, pay stubs and bills (or even just ripping them up before throwing them away) someone can simply take your trash and use this information against you. Now you should all know how much I hate receiving mail, but an added benefit of using the paper shredder is it saves you time time when dealing with your mail.
4. Add private registration to your domain names. (Learn how to do it for free)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (final time I swear) it’s very important to add private registration to your domain names. People can use this information as a basis to gather even more information on you as they did to me.
5. Use one credit card for your domain name account that you don’t use anywhere else.
A lot of domain registrars give access to would be thieves if they have either the pin to your account (this would be hard for them to obtain) or the last six digits of your credit card number which they could obtain from a dumb blockbuster clerk (as an example).
6. Forgo using a credit card in your domain name account and instead choose to pay via PayPal only.
The only way they can then gain access to your domain name account is to have access to your PayPal account which if you pay attention to my first tip you’ll be alright.
7. Don’t share more information than you have to.
The people most guilty of this are the common FaceBook and MySpace users, but it’s important to remember just how easy it is to find anything on the internet if you share it. Even with a user name or common nick name it’s easy to quickly learn a lot about someone. Remember that whatever you share on the internet can be easily found and sometimes can’t be taken removed.
8. Have good online manners.
A lot of what causes people to try and steal from you can be attributed to the way you have treated them (whether it was intentional or not). In general not being a jerk can go a long way. Most people won’t bother you unless you give them a reason to.
9. Don’t give money to someone offering millions of dollars to you provided you give them a fee in advance.
Ok this one is a joke obviously. It’s sad that people fall victim to this scheme, but if you’re reading this blog than I’m certain you’re smart enough to avoid this.
What else would you add to the list?
Excellent advice all around Chris. Some possibly impractical for a few, like having multiple credit cards available, but all good advice 🙂
Great tips man….I try to use the paypal plugin for firefox and have it generate secure credit cards for me so I don’t have to use my real ones. I also use robo form and have it generate random passwords for me, it’s easy to use the same passwords everywhere, but not smart.
I usually go through every once in a while and check them, if they are too simple or used to often I change them up.
Great post dude.
Thanks yah I use robo form as well (as you probably saw from the link above). Too bad it still doesn’t work with FireFox 3 though.
[…] Guthrie enlightened us with 9 ways to protect your online assets. I highly recommend you take a read of this if your serious about establishing and maintaining an […]
I have created my own tool which uses my password and the name of the site and creates my passwords, its awesome, now I wont forget them anymore. The shredder is also a great idea, need to get myself one of those, thanks Goran
Thanks for this good recommendations for protect us from this bad people 🙂
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Its very important to use different user names and passwords and this is applicable for all users. ID thefts and hacks are randomly taking place and all these guys require is a small piece of information to hack into our accounts. We just have to take all the preventive measures.