The Vulnerabilities of Online Shopping – Cybersecurity For You & Your Business EP #17

1) Is online shopping safe? How do you know?

You have to do research on the online store to make sure
a. There is secure browsing, HTTPS
b. The store secures your purchase
c. Your information isn’t shared in anyway
d. Strong password for your account
e. They have a good return policy
f. Do research on the company to see what other customers are saving on their website, social sites, google and other forums

2) What information should you provide?
a. Name
b. Mailing address to have the item shipped
c. create a unique username and password for that website that you store separately. As well using a secure password 10 to 15 characters with capitals, numbers and special characters
d. Method of purchasing which I recommend

– Visa with purchasing insurance on the card and that is not tied to any of your accounts
– PayPal that is not tied to any of your main bank accounts and/or profile. Have a separate profile set up for online shopping. This way if a hacker gets access to the account they only get access to that one account, not your entire banking profile

3) How do you know if a website is safe?
a. Research
b. Ask questions

– What level of encryption do you have
– Do you have purchasing insurance
– What e-commerce for payment solution does the company use
– What are their terms of service, yes I know a long boring read but if you want to know how to protect yourself you have to start reading these

4) What do you do if you get compromised?
Get out a notepad or create a new document for this, you want to keep a record of all of this:

a. Call the police and file report, request that you receive a copy of the report and the report number
b. Contact your payment provider, Visa, Bank, PayPal…etc and let them now that your account has been compromised. Ask them for a reference number
c. Follow up on the incident to find out how it is progressing

and much more

Watch the video above to learn more