Four More Simple Steps to Ensure Safer Web Browsing

Last week we posted four tips to help keep you safe while browsing the Internet. Using those tips, and these new ones, every day will help to ensure that you are not only protecting your personal data but also your organization’s information. Here are the additional tips that you can easily incorporate into your daily web browsing routine.

5. When you use a search engine, be very careful of the result you click on. Hackers use legitimate looking topics to trick you into clicking. Scrutinize the URL to ensure you are going to a legitimate web site. Be especially careful if you are searching for popular or trending topics, such as celebrities, recent deaths in the news, or major disasters, as hackers tend to create fake web pages on those topics.
6. Never trust free content. Free movie, music and video downloads often include pirated content and just as often this content contains viruses and malware.
7. Vary your passwords for important web sites. If you use the same password across many sites, it makes it easy for criminals to hack all of your accounts. Use more complex and varied passwords for important sites, such as banking sites or for your personal email. Never re-use these passwords for other web sites.
8. Be cautious of convenient features such as auto-complete for forms or “remember your password”. Web sites can use hidden fields to steal the data from forms. Also, criminals can hijack your browsing session and steal your information if you stay logged-in to a site.

New threats are emerging daily and it is more important than ever to make sure that you are practicing safe browsing. Sometimes the ways to safeguard your organization’s data are not always the most obvious and it is easy to be lured into a false sense of security. And new features and practices, like allowing your browser to remember your passwords, make your life easier can also make criminals’ lives easier as well. Implementing the 8 tips we’ve provided in our blog posts can help ensure safer web browsing.

Click here to download all 8 tips in one document.

Click here to learn about our Safer Web Browsing training module.