12 Tips For Safe Online Banking

One of the perks that come with today’s digital age is online banking and convenient online shopping. However, with convenience comes vulnerability. Having your financial information online can end up putting both your money and your identity at risk. There are ways you can make it safer to bank online.

Below, you will find some of the top tips from Loanza’s Quick Loans to keep you banking online and shopping online safely.

How To Make Your Online Transactions More Secure

1. Avoid using the same username and passwords for the various online accounts you have.
2. Choose a password that is strong and one that cannot be easily guessed or brute-forced. You want to include everything from symbols to upper and lower case letters to numbers.
3. Try to keep track of all of your accounts in a place that is safely stored offline. Ideally, you can get a safe to store this information securely. That way, you will be able to keep all of your accounts inaccessible to hackers.
4. Change your password as frequently as you can.

At the minimum, you should be looking to change it every 1 to 3 months.

5. Keep antivirus software enabled on your computer at all times.

Ensure that you have a firewall enabled as well. You should be looking to schedule antivirus and malware scans on your computer daily to spot potentially harmful files or applications. You also want to ensure that you are shopping online securely by looking to see if your software firewall is enabled and be certain you are connecting to HTTPS websites.

6. Keep your social security number protected.

Don’t give out your social security number to anyone. If you have a provider requesting your social security number, you want to ask them whether or not it is necessary. While some places do need it, others will be able to request other information from you instead. If they have their systems hacked, you want to ensure that your social security number isn’t compromised. Therefore, you want to try to protect it as well as possible.

7. Use a third party processor.

This can be a great way to keep your credit card protected when shopping online. By using a third-party payment processor like PayPal, you will be able to keep your information hidden while you are shopping online. These processors will help to provide a buffer between the retailer’s site to ensure that your information is encrypted and not passed along to them. You also want to only shop at online retailers with proper security protocols in place. Look for HTTPS:// whenever shopping.

8. Log out every time you finish managing one of your accounts.

You should be logging out once you have finished because it can help to protect someone from being able to access your accounts from your browser. It will also keep anyone who gains access to your computer out at the same time. Avoid allowing your browser to store all of your usernames and passwords. Anyone who gains access to your browser or computer would be able to access it. Try to sign up for two-step security for all of the sites that allow for it.

9. Use Pre-Paid Cards or Virtual Cards

If possible, you want to try to switch to using one-time-use pre-paid cards or even virtual cards provided by your credit card company. This can help to obfuscate your real credit card numbers.

10. Look out for suspicious things.

If you think something looks even remotely suspicious, get offline and shut down your PC.

11. Never use one-click payment options.

Always ensure that your transactions are requiring the entering of your password to process.

12. Avoid public WiFi to do anything remotely information sensitive.

You want to do all of your important banking and shopping at home. If needed, you should be using a Virtual Private Network to encrypt traffic if you must do online shopping or banking while on an unsecured WiFi network.