With the spread of covid19, all businesses and jobs have primarily been restricted to homes. And as it looks like the pandemic is here to stay for a while, it is essential to know how to keep your home cyber secure.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not just big companies with a vast database who have to worry about their systems’ safety. Small, individual systems are frequently targeted because they are vulnerable and easy to hack and get into.
Hence, it is wise to know a few tips and tricks to keep your systems safe and away from any potential attacks. Here are five tips to have a secure cyber home.
1. Have A Secure Wi-Fi Network
A Wi-Fi connection mainly supports the most stable home networks. This Wi-Fi connection has to be modulated by a router. The devices then take up the router’s signals in the house connected to the Wi-Fi. The essential part of having a secure Wi-Fi is to have an encrypted Wi-Fi. Enabling a system where no one would be able to access the Wi-Fi system you have set up for your purpose is critical.
One of the most secure ways of doing this is to use the security mechanism WPA2, which allows you to set your home Wi-Fi password. This system makes sure that devices that want to connect to your home Wi-Fi cannot do so without a person with the knowledge of the password operating it.
An important point to be careful about is who you give out the password to. Ensure that you trust someone before typing in your password in their system and that every device connected to the home Wi-Fi is secure and has updated softwares running on them.
Additional tip: Make sure to change all the default settings and passwords of a new router and make it more personalized. This will ensure that whoever to break into your home Wi-Fi system has a hard time doing so.
2. Set A Secure And Robust Password
Many tips are floating around the internet, telling you what a strong password should look like. And most of them have some guidelines to follow while doing so. But, setting a password need not be very complicated. Again, the key here is to set something very personal to you, and other people would not be able to guess easily.
Having a random phrase that might be of significance to you, however small or large, is useful as a password. Throw in a few numbers here and there and voila! You have a password that is going to be extremely hard to crack.
It is also useful to make use of the two-step verification wherever the option is available to you. That way, even after you type in your password, there is an additional step of a unique code being sent to your phone or email, that only you can access.
Additional tip: Set a different password for each account and device with access to your home Wi-Fi network. If you feel like you would not remember all the passwords, then it is a good idea to find a small detail in the password that you set and link the other passwords around that.
3. Use A VPN
VPN or a Virtual Private Network is a system of encryption used by companies and their employees. People who need to be on their company’s intranet system risk exposing information if they use a public network.
To go around this, VPN makes sure that the information being sent by one party to the other is sufficiently encrypted and only decrypted at the end when it reaches its destination. It does this by making a private connection between systems while maintaining access to public networks.
This means that information is contained within the network created by the VPN and is not exposed.
Additional tip: It is important to note here to use VPNs that are more popular than the others and preferably, requiring some payment. VPNs are known to reduce data speeds, and more popular ones make sure not to reduce the pace too much.
4. Be Aware Of What It Means To Have A Secure Cyber Home
The best thing to do when you aim towards having a secure cyber home is to be aware of all potential threats to your secure Wi-Fi connection. There are a few things to keep in mind to make sure that you always stay safe.
Never click a link to a site that is unknown to you. Always download or open information from sites that you trust. A reliable way of checking whether a site is secure or not is to look at the link’s start.
The’s’ stands for ‘secure’ and indicates that the website is safe and encrypted.
Just like being picky about the sites you visit, be attentive towards the emails that you get. It is a good practice to check if you know the person or the organization that has sent you the mail or whether you are even remotely aware of them.
Often, people wanting to hack into your system disguise the software they use to do so in a mail form. This mail, often disguised as an attractive selling point targeted towards you, once opened, could potentially hack your system, leaving you completely defenseless.
5. Be Prepared For The Worst
It is also essential to have a backup plan to turn to in case everything else fails. Backup your data regularly to a trusted cloud or other storage devices.
It is also important to divide your data and store them in different places or have multiple copies of them if something goes wrong. Using this article from RouterLogin you get access to your routerIP address. This way, if you are hacked, you would recover all the data that would have been otherwise lost.
