Last updated: December 25, 2022
Today, in a world where everyone is increasingly connected, there have never been so many cybercriminals, ready to do anything to hack you and get some information about you.
Quickly, if you are not careful, you can then be the victim of a scam on the internet or, for example, the theft of your bank details. Indeed, under cover of relative security, the internet is still a pretty dangerous place.
Yet, so often, we see hackers compulsively typing on keyboards and outputting lines of code into movies, in reality, things are often simpler. In effect the criminals are based on another fault than the computer one, the human fault.
Getting into a computer is not easy, but if you manage to convince the human behind to let you in, it's the jackpot. So, In this article, we will see how cybercriminals manage to hack into your online accounts and how to protect yourself from them.
Never open any suspicious attachments
One of the golden rules on the internet is simply to never open an attachment that might seem suspicious to you, especially in an email. Indeed, it is a hack as old as the world or rather as the internet.
The hacker often sends an email pretending to be someone he is not, like your bank or even the police. In this email, you will find an attachment that you will be asked to open.
In this attachment, you will find a very classic document that will not alert you more than that. The problem is that by downloading this document and opening it, you will have at the same time offered a gateway to the virus.
Therefore, if you have the slightest doubt about an email with an attachment, especially about the spelling which often betrays hackers, do not open the document and if necessary, call the service concerned for confirmation.
The police will never contact you by email, nor ask you for transfers
We told you, hackers often use fake identities and lately there are a lot of scams going around with people pretending to be the police and asking you to pay a sum of money.
Know that the police will never send you an email asking you to make a transfer on the net. If you have a fine to pay, you will be summoned or you will receive a notification by mail.
Never follow any link given in a Messenger, WhatsApp or other chat
Finally, the last important thing we want to warn you about when it comes to chat is to never click on a link from an email or a chat when you will have to pay.
Attackers commonly use trickssocial engineering to access your accounts.
Indeed, there are a multitude of copies of websites (Phishing) very convincing that can mislead you, even if you are well aware of the dangers of the web. Therefore, if you have to go to a site, type the link directly in the bar of your web browser.
You can also go through Google to do this, but this way you will avoid falling on copies of sites that could recover not only your email address, but in addition to that, your password, or even your login details. payment.
Beware of keyloggers
Keyloggers or keyloggers is a malicious program that will recover everything you type on the keyboard.
They are often used to capture sensitive data such as credit card numbers, passwords, and other account credentials. They then send this data to an attacker via the Internet.
There are even hardware keyloggers that plug between the PC's USB port and the keyboard connector and some can store up to 200 characters. They are cheap, they can be found for sale all over the web and they are undetectable by antivirus.
To protect you from keyloggers, I invite you to see this article: Protect yourself against keyloggers with KeyScrambler
Beware of illegal downloads
We are not going to bring you out the verse, illegal downloads, it is obviously prohibited as their name suggests and this potentially exposes you to heavy fines and prison sentences.
But this is not the only danger to which you expose yourself. Indeed, these files that you are going to download, nothing tells you from a reliable source that they contain only the movie or the music that you want.
Indeed, a hacker was able to take advantage of this to hide a virus inside the files and again, abusing you by making you download it at the same time as the file you wanted.
So be careful on this point.
Avoid reusing passwords
The next trick, it will jam 99% of users. Indeed, with the proliferation of online services, we tend to always use one or two passwords. It's just god blessed bread for pirates.
So, if they ever manage to recover just one of these passwords, it becomes extremely easy for them to break into all your accounts, sometimes even accounts that contain sensitive data such as payment data.
The solution to avoid this is to go through software called password managers.
These managers, they allow you to set up different passwords and find them simply by launching the software.
Beware of USB keys that you might find in nature
It's a little less common today, but for a while it was a very successful scam, especially in big cities. You found a USB drive on the floor, plugged it in, and got infected with a virus inside.
Worse still, there are now devices called usb killer and which look just like conventional USB keys. The problem is that when you plug them in, you discover that they are small high voltage generators.
This high voltage can then completely cause your motherboard to drop and destroy your pc at the same time. So be very careful and never plug a USB key found on the ground directly into your computer.
Run virus scans regularly
Finally, the last piece of advice we will give you is simply to do an antivirus scan on a regular basis, at least once a week to make sure that everything is fine on your machine.
Indeed, even taking all the precautions that you have been given, it still happens to be hacked, especially at times when you are not necessarily paying very close attention to the situation.
Therefore, it is important to quickly recognize that you have been infected with a virus and react accordingly. For this, we advise to do at least, one antivirus scan per week. Moreover, you can program them so that they are done automatically at night and do not bother you.