Since the end of February, cybersecurity has returned to the forefront. Perhaps you are wondering about your ability to protect your devices and data. Fortunately, in the field of cybersecurity, it is never too late to improve your best practices and use the right tools.
For hackers, spammers or digital crooks, any news event is a pretext to launch attacks. The war in Ukraine was thus an opportunity for them to multiply their phishing attempts under the guise of doing good deeds. Attacks that often come from Africa or Europe according to Bitdefender’s analyses.
If hackers mainly target an uninformed public, these attacks are however more and more elaborate. In this context, it is never too late to strengthen its cybersecurity. For this, it is advisable to turn to a trusted solution, ideally European. This is the case with Bitdefender, which offers many all-in-one security solutions capable of protecting both your PC and your smartphone.
Here are three basic rules of digital hygiene that will help you prevent most attacks or attempted attacks.
The basics: be careful what you download, and especially what you open
Paying attention to what you download on your computer or smartphone is undoubtedly the most basic advice and the one you get told the most. Of course, you are no longer fooled when a prince asks you to help him exfiltrate his fortune in your mailbox or when this strange email written in German offers to download a file as an attachment.
Today’s hackers have understood that to encourage their targets to open their files, they have to pretend to be a legitimate recipient and find subjects capable of grabbing their attention. It is exactly for this reason that you will always be advised not to open this “incredible” .ppt of 15 Mb on the most beautiful forests in Europe that your father sends you religiously every week. He himself does not know exactly where it comes from.
If today everyone is naturally suspicious of the content of their mailbox, this is much less the case on a smartphone and on messaging applications. After all, what’s the risk of clicking on a link sent on WhatsApp by that old friend you haven’t seen for 10 years? Or an SMS sent by Health Insurance? It is this feeling of trust that hackers seek to exploit during their attacks.
It is humanly impossible to always be on one’s guard all the time. It is also not shameful to be trapped by a hacker: if you have downloaded a rogue or corrupt file, it is most certainly because the trap was elaborate.
As such, the presence of an antivirus on your computer and your smartphone to scan the files you download in real time or to warn you that an attachment is potentially dangerous is a good safety net.
The most restrictive: make an effort on your passwords (and double authentication)
On the other hand, it would be entirely your fault if your email account is stolen because your password is too weak or you use the same one everywhere. We could minimize the subject by advising you to have at least a complicated password (with special characters, capitals and numbers) that you could easily decline when you create an account somewhere.
But in 2022 this is simply not enough. Hardly a week goes by without news that a tech company’s servers have been compromised. You not only need a strong password for each of your accounts, but also a unique password for each of them.
And for that, it is better to go through a password manager. They’re all now easy to use, sync across all your devices, and way more secure than any sticky note.
The principle is simple: a password manager saves all your “complex” passwords for you. You then have only one password to remember, the master password which allows access to this safe. The application will then take care of finding the login and password fields itself to fill them in automatically.
Password managers are now accessible and have all the features described above. A password manager is also included in the Bitdefender Total Security offer.
The simplest: install an all-in-one security solution
Finally, the best advice we can give you if you want to strengthen your cybersecurity as much as possible is to install a good antivirus. The antivirus of 2022 no longer has much to do with the one that was laboriously installed on your computer 10 or 15 years ago. It is a software solution capable of protecting both a PC, a Mac, an Android smartphone and an iPhone and which covers your cybersecurity as much as possible.
It regularly scans the files on your computer or smartphone, monitors the files you download and install in real time, includes a password manager and even a VPN.
As such, it is better to turn to experienced players in the field of cybersecurity, such as Bitdefender. This European company has a security solution that not only benefits from hourly updates but also relies on technologies based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. These technologies power behavioral analysis engines capable of instantly detecting new threats, even unknown ones. And because nearly all of the computing is done in the cloud, your devices are never slowed down.
Bitdefender Total Security is one of the best antiviruses around. It allows you to protect your PC, Mac, iPhone, Android or tablets at the same time, it is inexpensive: only 24.99 euros for 18 months, with 5 devices covered simultaneously. This special offer, including 6 months free, is only valid for a few days!
Bitdefender is a big name in European cybersecurity. An important criterion to consider: this not only means that your data is processed taking into account European law, but also that software tracking is guaranteed for many years. An argument that all antivirus vendors can no longer boast of given the current context.
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