How to Protect Yourself Against Security Breaches

- AD. This is a collaborative post -

I think everybody knows someone or has their information stolen or dealt with a security breach. Because of this, it's incredibly important to keep yourself well protected online as everyone can be a target. Today I'm going to share my experience with it and what I have been doing to keep myself as protected as well as I can. 
In 2018 alone, so many huge companies were hit with security breaches with hundreds of millions of people affected by them. One of the biggest ones I was aware of last year was with Cambridge Analytica, I'm sure you heard about this one and how they were harvesting data from Facebook with more than 80 million people affected by this exposure and all of this was done without user permission. With so many data breaches happening, there are many that I wasn't even aware of until I read this article via Seareach. In July of last year, Timehop was hit with a big data breach with 21 million users affected with their names, emails, addresses and phone numbers accessed and I hadn't even heard about it until now! 

Even with things like GDPR being in place, meaning that websites and companies have to tell us how our data is being used, we can all still be affected. It's not just your name and address that can be accessed, but it's also your bank information which terrifies me. I have so many details saved in my iPhone alone that if somebody accessed them, they could do some serious damage. I have multiple email addresses and having looked into seeing if I had been affected, I found that I have have been affected by a few different breaches, dating back to 2014! Two of the breaches I was affected by were with Dailymotion and Bitly for example. There a few different websites you can use to see if you were affected by any breaches. 

There a few different ways to keep yourself protected online. One of the most important things you can do is keeping all of your passwords unique, I hate doing this as I struggle to remember them all but it's worth it in the long run. I don't include anything personal in my passwords, I usually use a few different numbers, a completely random unguessable word and some symbols. Every few months I will go and change them, I usually try and to it on the first of the month so I don't forget to do it. With doing all my banking online and having a blog, I like to have a few different email addresses to keep things separated which I would really recommend. I have one specifically for important stuff like my banking, for example, one for social media and if I want to sign up to any mailing lists another separate for anything blog related. 

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