What Are You Doing to Beef Up Your Mobile Security?

Expect the unexpected.
Expect the unexpected and stay secure even on your mobile devices.

Recently my husband’s identity was stolen and my access to our bank account was hacked.

In my husband’s case a credit card was opened in his name.

In my case my online bank user name, password and PIN was used to raise credit limits and then steal over $3,000 from our checking account.

Our bank took care of the matter, but what was problematic was just how robbers got access to my own personal online access information.

The only thing we can think of is that I was using mobile banking features and may have accessed my bank while I was connected away from my home base.

As a result, here are the things that I have done to improve my mobile security.

1. My entire family now uses on their mobile devices face or voice recognition biometrics to access our most important bank. For our other bank, we use two step verification. All family members use two step verification via text messages to smartphones to access bank accounts online through desktops.

2. My entire family now has withdrawal, deposit and transaction alerts set up for banking, savings accounts, and credit cards. The focus is to catch robbers early before too much damage has been done.

3. I personally am using NordVPN which is a subscription base security tool for my smartphone that encrypts my communication on mobile data or when I am connected to any Wi-Fi hotspots out of my office. This will be especially important to me as I will be traveling in the months to come and this secure tunnel will allow me to encrypt data I exchange on the internet, geomask my location as well as to prevent eavesdroppers from snatching my user names and passwords.

Stay safe when you are online with your smartphone and encourage your family members to embrace new levels of mobile security to prevent the headaches that happened to us.

If you don’t want to move to a subscription service for security, Opera has just announced a free VPN for smartphones that is very simple to use. You can download it at Google Play or iTunes.

HTML Website Hack – Are You Secure?

Confused senior man
Hacked? You Need to Monitor Your Website for Hacking Proactively!

I just saw another html website hack this last week. We all know that WordPress websites and blogs can be hacked, and can actually be targets for spammers and porn spammers. But did you know that regular websites using html can be hacked too?

If you are not watching and monitoring your site proactively, your website can be a target for hackers too. On top of that think about the potential website traffic and loss of reputation for your business when you leave a hacked site uncorrected. for a long period of time.

Website Hacked This Past Week

A customer came to me for website updates this past week. His site had not been updated since 2014.  Before starting his updates this is what I found:

  • Weird php files were interspersed in his site files.
  • On the server a hidden folder was installed.
  • Self propagating files were embedded in his page code.

The key is that the site had been compromised in September 2015 (based on the file date stamp). Google had marked the site as containing malware in their index, but the client had not been watching. Over a year later I found that the site had been hacked.

The take away on this is that all website owners should register with the Google Search Console. At least this way if malware is found by Google on your website, Google will email you a note so you can take action.

Better yet is to hire a webmaster to do a monthly or quarterly review of the website to assure you are safe and not helping spammer and sellers of porn to sell their wares.