Improving Your Financial Security in the Current Age – Part 2

In the first issue of this two-part series on improving your financial security, we talked about ways you can situate your finances to mitigate threats to your short and long-term financial well-being, focused on how you can secure your income in the present, the future, and beyond your own life. It is unfortunate, but today those types of threats are not the only ones you have to be concerned with, because in a world that is becoming very much data driven and more reliant on being connected online, there are countless bad actors who are looking for ways to access your data and your digital footprint and use it against you. Ironically, in the midst of writing the first issue of this series, I had to engage assistance from IT professionals because of an intrusion into one of my social media accounts. Despite taking many precautions and attempting to follow best practices, there still is often something seemingly outside of your control that can put your data, and thus your financial security, at risk. Understanding that this is an area outside of my expertise, we will not attempt to cover all of the risks to your data, but we will highlight a few ways you might be exposed and how you can attempt to protect yourself as much as possible.

Your Personal Devices
The technology of today has allowed us to have incredible amounts of computing power at our fingertips almost anywhere we are. That provides us with the ability to do things that would have been unthinkable two decades ago, but it also opens us up to risks that go along with that power. Whether it is an actual computer, like a laptop, or even a smartphone, which is essentially a computer that can make calls, many of us find ourselves online constantly in one form or another and for a variety of different reasons. Getting online is so much easier now than it used to be because you can access a WiFi connection at so many more places now than you ever could. The bad news is that that easy access for you also means even easier access for the criminal element who want to take advantage of you. When using your personal devices, as much of a hassle as it may seem, it is important to utilize layers of security that make it harder for anyone to access your data. The first and easiest step is having passwords and lock codes that cannot be easily hacked, but that is only the beginning. Speaking of passwords, while it may be convenient to use one or a small number of easy to remember passwords for your various login accounts, doing so is putting you at risk. You should use different passwords for different logins and make them more complex, using combinations of letters, numbers, special characters, and capitalization to make it more difficult to hack. It is good practice to have security software on all of your devices, ideally one system that works on all of those devices to provide a consistent set of protections across your entire digital footprint. Having the security software is important, but it is also important that you keep it up to date by loading software updates as they become available. The last point with respect to personal devices is that sometimes the threat that gets you looks completely legitimate on the surface. No matter how legitimate an email or text message may look, if you get something you are not expecting, even from a source you do business with, look carefully before clicking anything that might allow a scammer to access your data, and if you can’t figure it out but have a suspicion, call that entity on a number you know if real and get verification.

Organizational Data Breaches
We tend to think of the threats to our personal data coming from us clicking on a link from a suspicious email or text, and that certainly is important to watch out for. However, in some cases, your data can be compromised in a way that you have nothing to do with, simply because your data is in the hands of some third party, and that data is compromised. As uncomfortable as it may be, we often have to share our personal data with the organizations we do business with, whether those businesses are in the financial realm or not. Because those organizations have access to a piece of your personal information, it is often the case that they have access to far more than just the information you may have provided them. In much of the business world, access to data on customers is critically important, whether that data has to do with their business interaction with you or not. As a result, these organizations, who typically store information on their customers in the cloud, are subject to being the target of hackers who know they can seek large paydays by hijacking data from these large organizations with presumably deep pockets. In recent years, there have been many high-profile organizational data breaches in many industries, from credit to banking to entertainment to even genealogy very recently. Providing the information necessary to do business with organizations is hard to avoid, so in order to protect yourself, it is very helpful to have access to services that can notify you about the potential of your data being part of a breach and that can help you clean up any issues that may result from your data being compromised. This access can come in the form of identity protection companies, internet security software, and from your own information technology resources, if you happen to have them. If you don’t have access to these types of tools, while there is a cost associated with using them, the cost could be far greater if you don’t have them.

Storage and Disposal of Your Data
While online threats to your data security are probably the most prevalent these days, some of the “old-school” ways of compromising your data still work extremely well. Because we are probably more vigilant about our online presence today, it can be easy to let some of the more traditional ways of maintaining data integrity fall by the wayside. Where and how you store your physical data is an important consideration. Many people today forgo receiving paper documents, but there are some things you will always receive in paper form, and if you have some type of system of storage, particularly for documents that has sensitive information in them, it needs to be as secure as possible. You may want to store important documents in a filing cabinet that has a key lock so that not everyone can get into it. For more sensitive information, you may go an extra step and put it in a safe that has something like a digital combination and/or a key lock to make it significantly more challenging to crack. Those are some things you can do with storage, but there may come a point when you have to dispose of the data you’ve stored, and that presents a whole new set of threats because it is hard to know who may see what you have thrown out. Whether you’re talking about paper documents, credit/debit cards, prescription information, or any number of other things that contain your sensitive information, just throwing them away is not a good idea, and even cutting them up may not be good enough. To be as safe as possible, shredding that type of information is perhaps the best solution. Something else you may not think of in an age where digital devices are made to be replaced in short order, you have data on your old device that could create problems in the wrong hands. You don’t want to just turn those old devices in where your data could be exposed or even reconstructed. You may need to go a step further and destroy the device or if you are turning it in somewhere, get professional help to ensure that your data is no longer accessible.

Stewardship Emphasis

Even for some things that may not seem important to you, you need to guard them as if they are because they might be important to someone else looking to hurt you.

The Empowerment Channel |Volume CCXXIII | Dedicated to Promoting Financial Education through Stewardship