How To Protect Your Financial Accounts Online

You can protect your financial accounts online by using strong passwords, updating your software, avoiding suspicious links and attachments, reducing your digital footprint and turning on financial alerts. 

Protecting your financial information is important to prevent identity theft and credit card fraud from happening to you. Identity theft can be emotionally draining and leave you financially bankrupt. Continue reading to learn more ways you can secure your online financial accounts and the importance of securing your financial accounts.

The Importance of Protecting Your Financial Accounts 

Leaving your financial accounts unsecured puts you at risk of account takeover attacks. An account takeover is a form of identity theft in which a cybercriminal takes control over your online accounts, such as your banking, investing or other financial accounts. Once a cybercriminal has taken over a financial account, they can steal your identity and commit credit card fraud. Cybercriminals who conduct account takeovers can commit crimes under your name and leave lasting effects such as damaged credit, debt, bankruptcy and potentially even a criminal record. You need to secure your financial accounts to prevent account takeovers that can lead to financial and identity theft.

1. Use Strong and Unique Passwords

You need to use strong passwords to protect your financial information from being stolen by cybercriminals. Using a weak password makes you susceptible to a password breach and can compromise your financial account. A strong password is at least 16 characters long and includes a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. It also omits personal information, dictionary words and sequential numbers.

You should have a unique password for each of your financial accounts. Reusing the same password for multiple accounts puts you at risk of an account takeover in which cybercriminals can take control of your finances. Using unique passwords for each of your accounts will help prevent account takeover attacks from happening to you.

Keeping track of strong and unique passwords for all of your financial accounts can be difficult on its own, so you should use a password manager to help you manage your passwords. A password manager is a tool that manages and stores your login credentials in a secure, encrypted vault. It helps identify weak passwords and prompts you to strengthen them using a random password generator. A password manager also stores the URL of the website that uses your login credentials and can autofill the credentials whenever you visit the website. It will detect if you are on a dangerous, spoofed website and will not autofill your credentials on those sites.

2. Enable MFA

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a security measure that requires you to provide an additional form of authentication before gaining access to your financial accounts. It provides an extra layer of security. You will only be allowed access to your account if you provide another form of authentication such as a one-time code in addition to your login credentials. 

Due to the sensitivity of your financial information, you should be using MFA to protect all of your financial accounts. You can choose to require MFA every time you log in to your account, when you log in with a new device or when you make changes to your account information. Even if your login credentials have been compromised, a cybercriminal would not be able to access your financial account since they couldn’t provide the additional form of authentication.

You should check with your bank or credit union if they offer MFA and how to set it up. Some banks that offer MFA are Barclays, American Express and Wells Fargo.

3. Keep Software Up To Date

You should keep all of your software up to date to patch any security flaws. Cybercriminals try to take advantage of security vulnerabilities found in hardware and software. They are always finding new ways to infiltrate your devices and steal your login credentials and financial information. Updating your software will help protect your devices from any new threats, as it updates your security.

4. Don’t Click on Suspicious Links or Attachments

Cybercriminals often use phishing attacks to trick users into revealing their personal and financial information. A phishing attack is when cybercriminals send messages to people or companies containing a malicious link or attachment. When the person clicks on the malicious link or attachment, it either installs malware on their device or takes them to a spoofed website to steal their information.

You should avoid phishing attempts to protect your financial accounts from being compromised. Unsolicited messages that urgently ask for your financial information are a sign of a phishing attack. To verify the legitimacy of a message sent to you regarding your finances, you should directly contact your financial vendor to confirm if they sent the message. 

Avoid any messages that prompt you to click on a link. Check the safety of a link by hovering over the link and looking for any discrepancies or by using a URL checker.

You should not click on any email attachments from unsolicited messages since they can potentially download malware on your device to steal your financial login credentials. You can use antivirus software to scan an attachment for malware.

5. Avoid Public WiFi

Public WiFi is unencrypted, which makes it susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks – allowing cybercriminals to eavesdrop and intercept your online activity. Some cybercriminals create fabricated WiFi networks for users to connect to and expose their personal data. You should avoid looking at your financial information over public WiFi since it is not secure and a cybercriminal can easily view it without your detection.

If you do need to view your financial information over a public network, you should use a VPN. A VPN will prevent cybercriminals from seeing your personal data and provide you with an additional layer of security when browsing the internet.

6. Reduce Your Digital Footprint

A digital footprint is traceable digital data that shows a person’s unique online activity on the internet. This can include information such as your browsing history, browser cookies, social media posts, shopping history and credit card information. Cybercriminals use this information to build a profile of you, based on your online activity and personal information. 

You should minimize your digital footprint to help prevent cyber attacks. By limiting what you post online and setting your accounts to private, you can stop cybercriminals from learning sensitive personal information about you. You should delete any inactive accounts, especially ones linked to your financial information. Never share any financial information online unless it’s through a secure, encrypted method.

You should also try to limit the use of credit and debit cards online to prevent them from being stolen. Only use these payment methods on websites you can trust, and only when necessary. Do not save them to your online profiles, because if a website is breached, your financial information could be as well. Try to remove your stored credit and debit cards whenever possible, especially on websites where they are only used once. 

7. Turn on Financial Alerts

You should be closely monitoring all financial activity on your online accounts. Review your financial statements to ensure that your transaction history is correct and that there are no unfamiliar or suspicious purchases. You can make this task easier by turning on financial alerts that will notify you of any of the following:

• Low or high balances in your financial accounts
• New credit and debit card transactions
• Newly linked external accounts
• Failed login attempts
• Password changes
• Personal information updates

These alerts will help inform you if someone has tried to compromise your financial accounts or has already done so. If you get any alerts notifying you of suspicious activity on an account, you should contact your bank or credit union immediately to change your login credentials.

Use Keeper To Protect Your Financial Accounts

You need to protect your financial accounts to prevent identity theft and credit card fraud. The best way to secure your financial accounts is by using a password manager that allows you to securely store your login credentials, MFA codes and more. You can sign up for a free trial of Keeper Password Manager to manage and strengthen your financial login credentials using a secure, encrypted vault.