What if your personal information is on the Dark Web?

There are countless tech news stories revealing corporate server hacks, online service compromise, web page hijacking, phishing attempts and resale of confidential information on the dark web.

Although there are now many tools to find out if your email address has been hacked or your credentials exposed, it is not always easy to react effectively in the event of proven personal data leaks. Here are some tips that will help you secure your privacy again and prevent such a situation from happening again.

Data Leaks on the Dark Web: Addressing the Most Urgent

An inaccessible social network account, a surprise password change alert, unrecognized movements on a bank account are all signs that portend the worst. Your personal data has been stolen and here it is in the hands of hackers who have most certainly disseminated or acquired it on the Dark Web.

The time is therefore no longer for prevention, but for action. When confidential information is exposed in this way, it is imperative to modify all your passwords, change your identifiers and immediately prevent web platforms from hacking your user accounts. In the event of theft of bank identifiers, it is of course urgent to call your establishment and make an opposition on your card.

After the emergency, it will be necessary to remain attentive to all suspicious banking movements and attempted digital identity theft. The damage being done, unfortunately there is no way to prevent the disclosure of the stolen data.

Review and consolidate the basics of online security

As you will have understood, faced with the irreparable nature of a data leak, it is better to take the lead and put in place a few automatic mechanisms that will help you prevent (second) damage.

A first requirement is to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on websites that support it. This involves providing these platforms with a second email address or a telephone number to which the online services send a confirmation code when you attempt to connect to your various user accounts. Thus, if a malicious person has taken your identifiers and tries to access your main inbox, your social networks or your online banking space, they will not be able to confirm your identity without being in possession of your smartphone. or your emergency email address (on which you will also have activated 2FA, of course).

Second point, and we can never stress this enough, it is essential to use unique passwords for each user account, to renew them regularly and never to reuse those that have already been used. Thereby, we opt for a solid password, that is to say a random sequence of characters comprising letters (uppercase AND lowercase), numbers, punctuation marks. Of course, codes that are easy to remember, and therefore easy to crack, such as 123456 or azerty are to be avoided.

A VPN to protect against login attacks

Despite all the precautions taken to strengthen the security of their online user accounts, no one is immune to being hacked into the network. A risk run, in particular, when connecting to open and/or very busy Wi-Fi networks. We think of public hotspots found in stations, airports, cafes, but also corporate networks or university connection points. Often poorly configured, and therefore poorly secured, these Wi-Fi accesses are considered playgrounds for hackers wishing to get their hands dirty before getting down to business. By pairing your computer or smartphone with this type of public network, the risks are as numerous as they are varied: interception and decryption of the connection, theft of identifiers, injection of malware on the devices connected to the hotspot.

If you want to connect to a public Wi-Fi network, it is therefore highly recommended to use one of the best VPNs like NordVPN. Intermediate between the user’s device and the visited website, it encrypts outgoing traffic using an unbreakable encryption algorithm, AES-256, and transports it, isolated from the rest of public communications, to the using a secure tunneling protocol: OpenVPN, NordLynx or IKEv2. Data packets locked in this way pass incognito through the potentially corrupted Wi-Fi connection point. And even if a hacker managed to intercept the VPN connection, it would be impossible for him to decipher its contents.

Before querying the visited website, traffic bounces back to one of NordVPN’s RAM servers where it is decrypted and then sent back over the public internet as a simple HTTP/HTTPS request. When it reaches the destination server, it is no longer identified by the Internet user’s IP address, but by that of the intermediate VPN server.

Traffic also remains secure on the return journey. When the web servers respond to the request, the data first travels over the public Internet, lands on the NordVPN server, is encrypted and routed to the user’s device through an isolated tunnel secured by a protocol. vpn.

Clearly, when NordVPN is active on a computer or smartphone, no one can intercept, decrypt or exploit the connection established between the Internet user and the VPN server.

Limit Phishing Risks with NordVPN Threat Protection

Although it secures your traffic and your connection data, VPN protection cannot protect you against yourself and the information you voluntarily communicate to malicious platforms or hijacked by hackers. Thus, as part of a phishing attempt, you may enter your banking information on a fake payment page or enter your personal identifiers on a fraudulent site copying an existing site.

To combat these abuses, NordVPN has implemented an anti-threat protection system. Integrated into its VPN client and accessible at no additional cost, the service blocks advertisements and web trackers, and removes tracking parameters. Even better, it blocks access to malicious websites, scans downloaded files, instantly removes dangerous items, and scans in the cloud, in real time, for suspicious executables that it was unable to diagnose at the time. of the download.

Dark Web monitoring: real-time alerts in the event of data leaks

Forewarned is forearmed, and NordVPN understands that. In addition to its virtual private network and anti-threat protection, the provider integrates a Dark Web monitoring module into its VPN client. Also available at no extra cost, the option is available to all NordVPN subscribers.

Using the Have I Been Pwned database, the service constantly tracks data leaks related to the NordVPN account email address. In the event of a new detection, you are instantly alerted via the NordVPN application and can take the necessary measures without delay, namely changing your compromised passwords and enabling 2FA on insufficiently secure websites.

Generate strong passwords and store them securely with NordPass

We always come back to this: a strong password is essential to the protection of personal data and confidential information. Hence the importance of mixing numbers, letters, special characters, to choose it as long as possible, to use it only for one account and not to reuse a password that has been used in the past.

However, it is difficult to remember dozens of complex passwords and to compose new ones at regular intervals.

This is where NordPass comes in. This premium password manager stores all your credentials, automatically generates and saves complex passphrases that you don’t need to remember. The only authentication code you will need to remember is the master password used to lock access to NordVPN’s optional service. NordPass of course supports multi-factor authentication and lets you create a list of trusted contacts in case you can’t access your password manager.

NordPass is available from €2.19/month for one user or €4.79/month for six Internet users, in addition to the NordVPN subscription. It is possible to test the service for 30 days, without providing payment information.