Whatsapp lauches a Security Campaign
WhatsApp launched an awareness campaign among its users at the end of January to remind them of the most critical factors to consider regarding cybersecurity and the significance of keeping our personal information safe online.
Even if it is an ironic measure designed only to lessen the impact of the fines that Facebook – owner of WhatsApp – is facing in the European Union and other parts of the world for the abusive use of its users’ private data, it is still an exciting measure that can help reduce the lack of knowledge that many people still have about the fundamental aspects of their online security.
What is the Whatsapp Security Campaign?
This new WhatsApp ad functions as a banner that appears in your chat app to warn us about the dangers of our online habits. There are many platforms with which we exchange our personal information to access their services on the internet, ranging from online stores to subscription services and messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Due to the vast amount of data handled by these programs, a data leak or careless use can cause severe problems for their users, which must be added to other cyber risks like malware, phishing, or sextortion, among many others. These are essential issues that many people are still unaware of. Thus efforts like these attempt to raise awareness of the importance of better internet behaviors.
Cybersecurity is increasingly critical in our day today
1. Antimalware Tools
Antivirus and other anti-malware software were essential 30 years ago, and they are still necessary now. These devices are required since malware and viruses are constantly evolving and capable of overcoming various risks to your personal information, passwords, bank account information, and even the integrity of your equipment.
Furthermore, while the top antiviruses had relatively high charges a few years ago, they now have different plans that are considerably more affordable if purchased as a family or among other close friends.
2. Strong Encryption VPN (Virtual Private Network)
Because of the high encryption, these technologies provide, installing a VPN for Chrome or any other browser, or, better yet, installing a VPN to protect all internet traffic on our devices, is a beautiful approach to protect our data online.
VPNs allow us to encrypt our online traffic, making it impossible for someone to decrypt it even if it is intercepted. This protects sensitive information like our email or social network login credentials, credit card information when making online purchases, and even the content of our chat messages.
3. Preventing Phishing Attacks
Phishing attacks use the impersonation of a person or a legitimate identity to gain passwords or credit card data. They can take the form of a fake web page asking for our online banking access code, an email requesting our credentials to address a problem on our social networks, or even SMS messages.
Because phishing is challenging to detect with anti-malware techniques, consumers’ participation in their cybersecurity becomes critical in detecting threats and avoiding providing data through bogus pages or emails.
4. Strong Passwords
Finally, to ensure the security of all our online accounts, it’s important to remember the necessity of sensible passwords. To keep our passwords safe, we must choose strong passwords and ensure that we do not use the same password for many accounts.
While dictionary attacks – a trial and error approach – make strong passwords much more difficult to guess, employing unique passwords can secure our passwords if one of the websites we use suffers a breach, filtering our access data. We should also use two-factor authentication to make our accounts even safer by using a second device to access them.
