Basic things that you NEED to do to secure your account

It seems that most of us have different account in different platform and most of the big deal is our security. As the number of people who get involved in technology, cryptocurrency and investments, the number of scammers and hackers are also increases to fool a person and get what they want financially. Thus, keeping your account secured is one of the most important thing that you need to do in cyberspace.

In this blog, our focus is to keep our account that is mostly related to our finance and assets. Since we are talking about money, we need to be careful on our actions because this is a real big deal especially to those people who just started in this kind of matter.

In this blog, we will talk about the following:

• Keep your seed phrase safe

• Never share your mnemonic phrases to anyone

• Don't click and sign up on suspicious links

• Try to use non-custodial wallet

• Turn on the 2-factor authentication

• Never trust anyone, don't be blinded on huge returns

Keep your seed phrase safe

You will always heard this line from people who believe in crypto for a long time ago. Seed phrase is a mnemonic phrases like password where the person who have it can have an access on your assets including sending, deposit, spend even withdrawing it without your knowledge.

Hence, keeping this secured is one of the most important thing. You can keep it securely depends on your preference such as:

• Writing it on a paper. In my case, I wrote my seed phrases on a piece of paper and notebook. In that case, you are kinda sure that it is safe as long as no one stealth it from you. However, there are still risks about this like someone stealth the paper, you forgot where you put the paper, someone accidentally read it and etcetera.

• Print it on bond paper. Excluding the copies of my seed phrase from my notebook, I also printed it on a bond paper. It is only for emergency purposes and it was kept on something private.

• Saving it to your notes [in device]. Saving it your notepad is also one of the option. However, I found this riskier because everything on your device is prone to hacking. Thus, this option is the least of my choice.

There are different ways to secure your important keys, it is a matter of your being careful and choice of what strategies you are doing to keep it secured.

Never share your mnemonic phrases to anyone

Sharing it to anyone is a foolish move, how about sharing it to a random stranger? I bet you will cry after that action. This thing is very obvious, sharing it to anyone has a 99% risk because it is possible that they will access your assets illegally.

Nevertheless, your relatives is an exception as long as you trust them. It depends on your trust between you and the person that you are willing to risk your asset.

Don't click and sign up on suspicious links

The number of people who are desperate to get something illegally is still alive and they love working with an effort—negatively. It is like their will is to have a better life but the process is wrong. Nowadays, the strategy of these people is not getting old—phishing attack.

It is like stealing your confidential information without your prior knowledge but you actually did it on your own. How? Sometimes, their tactics is to send a link to you and if you are a fooled enough, it is possible that you will click it without observing what kind of link it is. Worst, if you signed up on the link and put your credentials...it is like giving your information for free including your assets.

There are also different ways to determine if a link is more likely phishing like:

• Using unique characters on the link such as “ä” instead of “a”. If someone sent you a link (e.g reäd.cäsh) then it is obviously scam, unless it is the official website sent by the admin.

• Links that saying that you won something from their giveaway. First and foremost, if one company have a giveaway, you must visit their official website not the suspicious one like (jread.cashhejfue.com) obviously, that is scam.

Do your best to use non-custodial wallet

There's a huge difference between custodial and non-custodial wallet. The former is like an exchanger where you don't have a mnemonic phrases, the examples are Binance, Nexo, Celcius, coins.ph and etcetera. They are like a wallet where you can store your assets, however it has a higher risk compared to latter, why?

Non-custodial wallet is safer than custodial wallet because in non-custodial, you are holding your own assets, the risk will always depend on your actions. It has a mnemonic phrases where you can control your coins anytime, the examples are Trust wallet, Safepal wallet, bitcoin.com and etcetera.

Things to remember:

• Non-custodial means you are holding your own assets while in custodial wallet, it is prone to risk because if the exchanger had a problem and attacked by hackers, your money is involved and there is no solution to recover it unless the company give you an insurance or something on their terms and conditions.

• Not your keys means not your coins.

Recently, the news of bitcoin.com posted a blog regarding to the possible attacks of the hackers on different exchanges. The FBI warned the investors ans holders to keep an eye on their accounts because we are all prone to hacking.

Read the full story here: Possible attacks of hackers

Activate your 2-Factor Authentication

You might be thinking that your email and password is enough to secure your accounts but most of the time, there is no impossible in hackers and desperate people to scam someone. Thus, they have a lot of techniques to encourage and persuade you to bite their bait.

One of the ways to keep your account secured is activating your 2 factor authentication for extra security of your account. There are few exchanger who have this feature especially Binance and Nexo where you can choose between SMS, Email and Google authenticator for your 2FA.

How it works? Everytime you sign in to your account, there's one thing that you need to provide excluding your password and email, it is the code that will be sent to you depends on your 2FA. It's either on your SMS, Email or Google authenticator. But ideally, the best way is to activate all of the possible 2FA for more security.

Conclusion

Most likely, everything is possible on professional hackers and the best thing to do is to keep our cybersecurity stronger to lessen the risk of hacking. The truth is, we are all prone to hacking and it is only a matter of our actions if we will choose to be safe by doing the things thag you think is right like the things on the list above.

Since we are talking about finance, it is undeniable that it is such a big deal for us especially if we can't afford to lose our money. Hence, the best way to do is to keep your account secured by doing the basics and double your security to mitigate the risk. In the end, the risk is on our hands and decisions.

Published: July 13, 2021