Ways To Make Your Laptop Safe When In Use

Keeping your laptop secure from malware and hackers alike is crucial in the online world we live in. This ensures that your work and personal information stays protected. If you’d like to learn some handy tips for how to protect your devices while you use them, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading down below to learn 4 new ways to keep your devices safe!

1. Set Complex Passwords

While it’s not ideal to rely on passwords alone to keep your laptop secured, they’re a great starting point regarding further improving laptop security. Login passwords are fundamental in keeping others from acquiring unwanted access to your laptop. Setting a password-secured lock or biometric lock is a brilliant idea if you often use your laptop in public places, including an office. It should be something you can remember, but unique and challenging enough to hold back unwanted visitors. Try using symbols, numbers, sentences, or entire phrases, and try not to use your birthday or spouses/girlfriends name, for example.

DO:

• Set a unique and tricky passphrase or password for signing into your laptop.
• Use a password-secured screensaver if you step away.
• Use authentication methods that limit password use, similar to single sign-on.

DON’T:

• Reuse similar passwords across various accounts.
• Share passwords with others, including friends or colleagues.
• Use auto-remember features/password managers on websites; these are helpless against data breaches.

2. Update Your Laptop’s Software

Do laptops require an antivirus? The correct answer is yes. Work-issued laptops will often have antivirus programming already installed. Whether installed by your work or out of your own choice, there are a couple of things you must do to ensure your laptop is protected.

The first step is to be mindful of what you download; updates and files that contain odd phrasing or expansions could be harmful to your device. If you’re ever in doubt, use your antivirus to check any documents before opening them.

Keeping programs up to date is also a vital step in staying protected. Programs like Chrome and Firefox might update by default but restarting them every so often will ensure that the security updates are in effect. Moreover, turning on auto-update or, in any case, manually updating your laptop and programs will assist with restricting vulnerabilities.

Virus detection relies upon up-to-date virus signatures and definitions, so it’s ideal to use programming with automatic definition updates. On the off chance that the feature is not available, set yourself a reminder to manually update these definitions on your laptop.

DO:

• Scan all files with antivirus programming prior to opening them.
• Consistently update your software virus definitions.
• Turn on auto-updates for your programs, browsers, and operating system.

DON’T:

• Recklessly download files or visit unsafe website pages.
• Leave virus definitions and security software out-of-date.
• Make sure to choose the best antivirus software for your laptop and needs, for more information click here.

3. Encrypt Your Hard Drive & Back-Up Data

Encryption is probably the best line of defense against cyber attacks and theft. The best type of defense for your laptop includes encryption. Login passwords alone aren’t guaranteed protection: hackers and criminals alike can take out your laptop’s hard drive and read your records directly, and talented hackers can get access to your operating system’s login screen.

Encryption changes documents and information into code, clouding their actual contents and making it a lot harder for hackers to steal your data. By encrypting your hard drive, hackers will not be able to boot your laptop or access any documents and files on the hard drive without having the correct encryption key. Thus, encryption gives an excellent safeguard against undesirable access attempts. However, it would be best if you stored the encryption key on a different device, such as a USB drive or even your phone.

Should anything end up risking your files, having a recent backup of your information can be the distinction between a minor inconvenience and a disaster. Cloud administrations like Dropbox and Google Drive give the necessary resources to back up information, as do systems like Windows and macOS. You can likewise use external drives, like USBs and external hard drives.

Whichever strategies you settle on, the key is to back up your information at regular intervals, especially if you’ve created files that you cannot afford to lose. Likewise, with your hard drive, encrypting your backups is a reasonable idea for max security.

DO:

• Encrypt your hard drive.
• Back up your information consistently, and encrypt those backups as well.
• Store encryption keys on separate devices.

DON’T:

• Put off backing up your records, especially with significant work in progress.
• Leave your backups and hard drive unencrypted.

4. Increase Your Authentication

Your professional, social, and financial records are probably all accessible from your laptop, so you must consider online safety measures to secure them. Executing multi-factor authentication implies that hackers will not access your records even with the correct login credentials. Multi-factor authentication means you will have more than one protection measure in place. This could be a password, as well as a One Time Pin (OTP) that is sent to your phone.

Hard tokens, such as YubiKeys, give a more effective layer of security for your laptop. By plugging his security gadget into your laptop, you are able to authenticate web logins alongside or as opposed to your password. Some frequently-used online administrations, from Google to Windows, support YubiKey-based authentication. Hackers can’t reproduce or meddle with YubiKeys, but you do have to keep them in your possession.

DO:

• Use YubiKeys, verification applications, and other valid authentication tokens to log in.
• When it makes sense to use biometric authentication (e.g., fingerprint scan).

DON’T:

• Depend on passwords or SMS codes to ensure your records are safe.
• Depend on security question answers; they’re relatively easy for other people and hackers to guess. 

These are just some of the ways that you can keep your laptop safe while you use it. It’s essential in this day and age that you do what you can to protect yourself and your devices.

Herbert Wise

“Award-winning food geek. Unapologetic gamer. Wannabe web junkie. Amateur coffee maven. Zombie fanatic. Writer.”