I hope you are all having a great day, and welcome to this article where I talk about some of my general Cyber Security tips designed to help prevent data breaches affect your accounts. I’ve been told in the past that many users feel like they won’t be targeted with these sorts of attacks.
The important thing to note here is breaches are very often completely automated and don’t target a specific individual… Most of these tips will be suitable for all platforms, not specifically iDevices.
This article is suitable for both technical and non-technical users. If you have any questions about the terminology please do, as always, feel free to get in contact!
Use Two Factor Authentication
Using 2FA on all of your accounts helps to prevent access to your online accounts, even if your password has been breached.
For example, if you were affected by the recent announcement of Malware stealing Device Keychain information from the Mac and iPhone, your credentials are being held by the un-named service for potential misuse.
Enabling 2FA, a ‘second step’ is required in order to successfully authenticate to your online accounts. This makes breaching an account significantly more difficult as it requires access to another method of authentication other than your password. This could be a one-time code sent via text message to your phone number or using some form of Biometric Auth such as TouchID.
Check The Permissions
As of macOS Catalina, Permissions have been tightly restricted when applications attempt to access sensitive User & System directories.
When these prompts appear on a seemingly minimal application that shouldn’t need access to these directories, proceed with caution! Personally, if I’m in that situation, I tend to deny them access and read the inevitable error message that appears on the display after I decline access.
Not that the error message makes the access any more credible! But it can sometimes point to legitimate use. If you’re not sure, decline! A similar practice applies to Windows UAC Prompts, although they are much less granular in terms of the permissions granted.
Don’t Download RAM…
So, this mention was a suggestion from a community member. No matter how much of a joke it might sound to technical users, It’s so important not to give in to ‘clickbait’ sites. If it looks too good to be true, it very possibly is…
Use A VPN!
I often have a VPN enabled on my machine. Benefits include being able to browse to secure websites like internet banking on public hotspots without traffic being intercepted by a malicious user nearby, and integrating an ad-blocking DNS which many VPN providers include for free! This allows ads to be transparently blocked on all applications without the use of an ad-blocking browser extension.
I personally use TorGuard VPN… (This is absolutely not a sponsored post) and they have served me well. There’s a discount code I use on mine, VPN50TG (I think?) which discounts your bill to $5 per month which is a nice perk.
HTTPS….Everywhere
This is optional and doesn't always matter so much as the majority of sites enforce using HTTPS regardless of user preference now. However, there are still a few sites that will load either! Bing in particular…not much more to say there! HTTPS Everywhere browser extensions redirect all your HTTP traffic to the HTTPS counterpart if it’s present for that web service!
Password Managers!
If there’s anyone I know that’s a specialist in Password management & recovery, it’s the amazing team at ElcomSoft - So I spoke to a member of the team to listen to their opinion on this! They mentioned that 1Password, although probably not perfect, is the best that they’ve tried - A great balance of Security and Usability.
ElcomSoft also found a potential security weakness in 1Password some time ago, and it was fixed by the 1Password team extremely quickly and posted about it on their social media, quoting ElcomSoft. This is of course quite rare to see in an age where businesses are constantly trying to hide security weaknesses.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and learned something new!
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