ON HACKING OF PHONE NUMBERS AND EMAIL

It is already a matter of public notice that several phone numbers, Facebook addresses and email addresses have been hacked lately. To curb this incident that is spreading like wildfire there are a few steps that you can put in place as safety measure to keep your bank details and other personal information safe. I will try & keep it simple with little or no jargons
1. Don’t use the phone number you use in opening your bank account in public forums, it is not safe. Alternatively you can have another line that is not linked to your bank details for these public forums and give such personal number to only trusted family and friends if you must. It does not cost more than 200 naira to get a new line and with 5k you can get a double sim Low earn phone for it.
2. There is always a column in Bank forms for customers to write their email address & tick if you want online banking, do well to use a dedicated email addresses that is not known to the public for such documents. You can open as many email addresses as you want it doesn’t cost you up to 100MB to open an email address. So have one email address to use when you want to fill all those online forms that you are not sure of and avoid the temptation of using this email for your financial transactions.
Also note that you can still fill your email address and Not tick online banking. Ticking online banking means that you want to use the bank app and other online provisions for your bank transactions.
3. Watch the url or address of any website you visit and make sure that the landing page is actually what the address says. Eg if I enter www.inecnigeria.org and I am migrated to another address instantly that says www.inecnigeria.net (Notice that the first address is Dot .Org & the second is dot .com) or any other address different from what you entered in the URL bar(the place you type in www.) then you should be careful the information you put in such website. But note that this applies to the landing page only because most websites links you to other websites and pages but you must be sure that what you click is what the website is returning. Site are developed in logical sequence and so if you click a page in INEC website and it takes you to a bet naija shop online you should know enough to run
4. Once in a while try and clear your browsing history. if you loose your phone, there are so many softwares out there that can break your phone access and a look at your browsing history will tell a hacker how to go about getting information about your online activities.
To clear your browsing history, go to the top right corner of your browser (if you use android OS phones ) check by the side of the bookmark check/uncheck buttons u will see all the websites that you have visited in the last few weeks, u can use clear or delete to delete them this may vary from browser to browser.
If you use iOS you can clear your history by opening your safari (browser) and using the fourth icon below the page that looks like an open book. Once you tap the icon you will see all the pages you have visited. Just tap clear to delete them & bookmark only pages that you wish to follow up on.
5. Passwords, it is not safe to use the name of your wife, children or their date of birth as passwords. The point is that if a hacker targets you in person he/she can use the next six months gathering details about you, following your online activities even if it means doing one hour background check on you every day until he achieves his aim & your own goal is to secure your online activities and frustrate any hacker that will want to sift you online. If you must use them combine alphanumeric & special characters to make your passwords stronger eg of alphanumeric passwords is as follows since my name is Paul I may use the following as a password PaUl_10$$&echo as a password. I have used P as a capital letter which is different from small lower case in the field of computer, also used U as a capital letter, I also added numbers and underscore plus dollar sign and echo which makes sense only to me. The idea is that the longer & more combinations of characters the tougher it will be for any hacker to guess. Just be sure to remember anything you use as a password�

There is so much that all internet users must know about Cyber(online)security but the above are basic steps that we can easily do with little or no help. If time permit & it is welcomed by the Admin we can share some of these information bit by bit until we all learn what we should about cyberspace security since we are now in the so called IT age & there is virtually any week that we don’t perform one online activity or the other.