You might entrust your computer with a lot of confidential information by storing in your passwords, credential details, social security number, email accounts, banking details and what not. But, what you must know is that you must exercise a lot of caution when storing personal information on computer carefully or else you might prey to identity theft.  To prevent identity theft let’s first have a look at what all in your computer is at the brink of danger.

The areas that are the most vulnerable to theft include –

• Files and documents present in several locations on your computer.
• Information regarding email accounts and passwords stored in your web browser.
• Windows registry (You might delete a password from one location but despite that, it may still be present in your registry).

Here are a few ways and means using which you will be able to prevent identity theft against all types of criminals – scamsters, fraudsters, hackers and many others.

Secure Your Identity Using Sophisticated Tools

Personal information on the computer can be efficiently protected by using a sophisticated identity protection software. Amongst many such tools, Advanced Identity Protector is unarguably one of the best software available.

Once installed, the identity protection software tracks all the hidden identity traces that are present in various locations on your computer. These locations include your browsers, drives, email accounts, etc. It even tracks those traces that are deeply embedded in your Windows registry.

Once these identity traces are identified, you can move them to a secure vault which you can secure using advanced ID theft protection.

Other Ways To Prevent Identity Theft

1. Always Use Strong And Creative Passwords

As a first to prevent identity theft, you should also make sure that you create a strong password. Always use passwords that are a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters. Also, try and include non-alphabetic characters like #, @, etc.

You can be as creative as you want. The password needn’t be so typical that you are not able to remember it yourself. For e.g. In the sentence “This is a great password”, you can take the first letter of each word and change great to “GR8”. So, this way you could have a password like Tiagr8p. Another great way to keep passwords safe is to change them every six months.

2.  Encrypt Sensitive Information

If you think a password is all that’s required to stop thieves from snooping into your computer, you might be totally wrong. It might come as a shocker that passwords can be broken or bypassed easily by cyber criminals and malware. That is where encryption comes in. Encryption is mostly advisable when you wish to encrypt details that you don’t use very often but whose stealth is dangerous. There’s no dearth of free encryption software that help encrypt personal information on Computer with the utmost ease.

3. Refrain From Storing Passwords In Browsers

 Once the computer goes into the hands of a hacker, passwords can easily be extracted. Needless to say, the hacker would also have access to your emails, online banking accounts and several such accounts. That’s the reason why you should not store passwords in your browser if you wish to prevent identity theft.

Also Read: How to Protect your Personal Data using the most secure Web Browser?

4. Don’t Know The Source Of An Email – It’s Better Not To Open It

To prevent identity theft you must also be aware of the source of your emails. There are certain emails that might land up in your junk folder and there is a good reason why that happens. Such emails contain Viruses, Trojan Horses and other malware that can be used to extract information from your computer. So, if the email looks suspicious and you don’t know the sender, it’s better not to open the email.

 5. Keep Your Computer Updated

With updates regularly being ruled out, it is important that you update your system regularly. These updates bring tons of new features and fix minor to major bugs that might affect your system’s performance.

6. Always Keep Your Windows Armed With A Good Antivirus And Firewall

It doesn’t matter if you have a small home network or at a large office network, worms, hackers and viruses can attack you anywhere and the firewall doesn’t let that happen. A firewall controls online activities by first analyzing and filtering small packets of information, it then sends information to the requesting system and finally, matches the data packets to a reliable information database.

Protecting yourself against identity theft will ensure that both you and your sensitive digital data are safe and sound. The above steps would also help fight back cybercriminals who don’t give a second thought before stealing your data and using it to damage your identity.

Do share this post with your friends and family so that we may together be able to counter cybercrime. If you have more such views or if you want us to blog about more tech-related topics, do share with us in the comment section below.