4 Methods You Can Use to Protect Your Digital Identity

Protecting your digital identity is vitally important. Hackers, thieves, and all manner of malicious characters can utilize your digital identity to take money, commit acts under your name, and even vote as if they were you.

But what is digital identity? Your digital identity is the information stored by a computer system or organization used to make sure that you are who you say you are. A person’s overall digital identity is comprised of numerous strands of authenticating information. This can include information such as your biometric measurements, your social security number, and your bank account details. Visit Fortifid to learn more insights about this topic.

Here is a very brief guide to some of the methods you can use to protect your digital identity. It is crucial that you look further into any of these methods that you don’t quite understand already. 

Randomize Your Password

One of the easiest ways to gain entry to your private accounts and fully compromise your digital identity is simply by cracking your passwords. Think about it: so much of your important data is kept ‘safe’ behind passwords. 

The problem is, passwords are easy to crack if a hacker knows what they are doing. One way to negate many password cracking techniques is to use a random password generator. These applications create unique strings of letters and numbers that have nothing to do with you or your personal life – making them much harder to crack. Random password generators are not entirely foolproof, however. Hackers can use brute force attacks to gain entry. Remember to have a different randomized password for each online account. If not, a hacker will be able to gain access to all of them, even if they only crack one. 

Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-Factor Authentication – or MFA for short – is a technology that provides extra security by requiring multiple kinds of authenticating evidence before allowing a user to gain entry to a service or site. Essentially, multiple elements of a user’s digital identity must be harvested. This prevents hackers that have stolen one element of a person’s digital identity (like a password) from gaining access. It is much less likely that a criminal will have stolen, say, a password and biometric data than one or the other. 

Only Trust Businesses That Use Document Centric Identity Proofing 

Signing away your sensitive information online to businesses that do not use secure identity proofing methods can lead to criminals making off with your important details. Document-centric identity proofing is likely to become the norm for businesses that want to protect their customers. This kind of identity proofing involves scanning personal documents – passports – in a secure and encrypted fashion. 

Use Common Sense

Ultimately, the best weapon you have in the battle against online fraudsters is your common sense. Your details can be revealed in plenty of ways that are pretty much just slip-ups. Sending your bank details over an unencrypted messaging platform, for instance, is an easy mistake to make that can cost you everything you own. It is wise, for private conversations, to use an encrypted messaging platform, with heightened security measures, for instance, pgp chat, that offers Secure Chat users the ability to send and receive PGP encrypted messages directly from the chat app.

I am Finance Content Writer. I write Personal Finance, banking, investment, and insurance related content for top clients including Kotak Mahindra Bank, Edelweiss, ICICI BANK and IDFC FIRST Bank. My experience details : Linkedin