Safe browsing 101

--Originally published at Allow Yourself to fail and learn… and hack

Collaboration made with edy

Through all the semester we have discussed about the risk we can found on web. The certifications, and methodologies developers can use to provide a more secure ecosystem for their users. And about the different type of hackers we can found out there. There are still so many things to learn and practice related to security on the web.

Since many of the blog posts we have participated on were focused or at least required of slight knowledge on computer security, we want to make this post a friendlier one, a post we can share with anyone, and hopefully prevent people from bad practices online.

Let’s start with the basics:

  • Be aware that anything shared online is prompted to be shared with anyone. So avoid personal and important information to filtrate just by not sharing it. (no passwords, no personal documents, no card numbers should ever be shared if not really necessary).
  • Be careful and extremely suspicious about sites asking for personal information, there are many people illegally acquiring personal information by disguising as other services companies and asking users to submit their personal data. A real example that happened to us:I received an email invoice from a transaction for 100 dollars made on PayPal, attached was a link in case I wanted to cancel the transaction. I have a PayPal account, but I never used it on this year. Checking on the official site I realized there wasn’t such payment. Curious about the received mail I accessed to the link and there was a supposed PayPal login. By providing a mail that I’ve never used on PayPal and a random password the system granted me access, and ask me to submit all my personal information. The site looks exactly like a PayPal site, but it
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    totally a fraud. I was able to identify it, but I’m sure there are many people who innocently shared their information.
  • Use strong passwords, the amount of people using passwords like “password” or “admin” is worrying. Try with capitalized letters, numbers, and random words. A tough to get password will protect you from attacks and prevent others from accessing to your personal information.
  • Be careful with open Wi-Fi networks, anyone can access to the information shared in this networks.
  • Keep your system and applications up to date. Developers are constantly fixing security bugs.

These are just a few recommendations we provide, be always aware of what you are doing and protect your information.giphy-1