The more you use cloud services, the more you are at the risk of password theft and other negative effects of Cyber crime. Most of us have confidential data housed in storage devices, but we never bother to keep it safe as we should either. Although you cannot control all attacks of Cyber crime, you can still undertake some efforts to prevent intruders from accessing your data. Here are some easy tips that help you to secure your data in the Cloud.

1. Take good care of your passwords

Passwords are designed to protect important data from prying eyes. They function like locks. Passwords are annoying and remembering them is a pain. Hence, many of us tend to create passwords that are easy to remember. But there are many software solutions that detect and disclose the most used simple passwords. You need to set complicated passwords that are hard to guess even if someone attempts to hack it. Unique passwords can be set with unusual configuration of letters, numbers and symbols. For instance, if you think of using your pet’s name “bingo” as the password, it could be easily cracked in less than 3 minutes. Instead you could capitalize the first letter of the word, use the number “1” in place of the alphabet “l” or a zero in place of the alphabet “o”. Include some random characters like a “+” sign or “_”. Now you could use “B1ng0#_” as your password which is strong and follows all the guidelines.

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2. Don’t reuse or share passwords

We often set one or two passwords and use them repeatedly for our web logins such as e-mail, banking, Facebook, etc. That’s really bad because if someone hacks your password, he can easily access your e-mail account and can change the original password. This makes him easy to gain access to other sites you’re registered on and change all those passwords.

Set unique passwords for every site. In case, you plan to use the same word or phrase across multiple sites, do so with some changes with the letters or symbols. Never use a same password across a site that has your credit card information or other important documents. Don’t leak out your passwords to others even if you trust them.

3. Backup your data

Sometimes a crashed hard drive, robbery or power surge may cause you to loose all of your data. To prevent such situations, it would be wise to back up your data on external hard drives or cloud storage solutions. Cloud storage providers such as Drop box, Windows Live Skydrive and Amazon’s Cloud drive offer a couple of Gigabytes of free storage. They create a folder on your hard drive that’s hyperlinked. All you need to do is drag the files to be uploaded into this folder. Once your files are on these storage providers, they’re saved and stored automatically without causing any loss of your data.

4. Use two-factor authentication

No matter how strong and unique your password maybe, there will always be the chance of a hacker accessing your account. Cloud services provide you with a two-step authentication method that prevents a would-be attacker from accessing your data. As soon as you login with your user-name and password, the two-factor authentication sends a unique code to a device that you have. For instance, the unique code could be via an SMS message to your mobile phone. Only on entering this unique code you are allowed to access your account. Although it is difficult to always look to another device each time you login, it’s a pretty effective method even if someone hacks your password.

5. Encrypt

Encryption software makes your data unreadable by unauthorized persons and requires a password to decrypt it. However to make you more secure, it requires you to remember the password for its services. Losing the password would mean losing your access to the data. Client-side encryption is probably the best software for encrypting your data.

6. Delete some stuff when it is done

Sometimes you do not want anyone to access potentially damaging information such as the e-mails that carry your credit card details or password reminders for online accounts. A smarter idea would be to encrypt those messages or delete them as soon as you take their backup.

7. Don’t click on suspicious mails

Don’t click on links or view attachments in suspicious e-mails, though they are from companies that are familiar to you. If you suspect any stuff or site that seems sketchy, leave. By doing so, you could prevent others access your account.

Hopefully you can apply these tips to your accounts and gain a peace of mind knowing that your data is secured from hackers, in the cloud with its multi-security plan.

Kelly Marsh

Kelly is a writer/blogger. She loves writing travelling and reading books. She contributes in Caribbean Cruise Line Scam. Her contribution can be also found here Caribbean Cruise Line Scam

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