My Top 7 Security Tips Explained
Since the safety of your crypto relies completely on how you handle it yourself, it’s very important that you take the right steps to make sure your computer and storage security is top-notch.
Let’s go over the top 7 things you can do to keep your crypto safe from hacks:
1. Keep it off exchanges
First and foremost – if your crypto isn’t under your complete control, you should consider it unsafe.
As the saying goes: ”Not your keys, not your coins”. If you don’t hold the private keys yourself, there is always the risk that whoever does (i.e. the exchange or another party) may lose it.
Always make sure that you only hold the minimum amount of crypto on exchanges or any online wallet to fulfill your needs – anything else should be stored securely and offline, ideally in a hardware wallet such as a Ledger or Trezor.
2. Virus protection
This one goes without saying but is often forgotten. A lot of malicious software these days is now targeted towards cryptocurrency. There are all kinds of malicious software including keyloggers (which record everything typed into your keyboard), imitation software like copycat cryptocurrency wallets, and more.
A good up-to-date antivirus software can stop many of these threats at the door.
3. Security-focused browsers
Security-focused browsers can go a long way thanks to their ability to block malicious ads and pesky website trackers.
The privacy-focused browser Brave is based on Google Chrome and feels just like it, but works to eliminate all ad trackers on the websites you visit. These trackers are often used by websites to identify users and see what other websites you’ve visited – and can even identify items you’ve purchased or checked out.
By removing this tracking feature, you’re less likely to be targeted with scams or have a digital identity collected based on your browsing history.
To top it off, Brave rewards its users for viewing its own approved ads by paying them in their native Basic Attention Token (BAT).
4. Separate email accounts
If you haven’t already, you should create a new secure email account for crypto purposes – ideally, a separate email account for each exchange or crypto service you use.
Although this can seem like a huge pain, the reasoning is clear as day: If you only use a single email account and it gets compromised, all your crypto accounts are put at risk at once.
Breaking this up into multiple accounts, especially if you have plenty of money on the line, will isolate any single hacking incident to a single crypto exchange or account, rather than all of them at once.
Such risks can arise more often than you realise, most recently with data breaches from BitMEX (where user emails were revealed), and crypto lending platform BlockFi. Leaks of user emails and passwords for non-crypto websites have also occurred many times, including MyFitnessPal and Zynga.
5. 2-Factor Authentication
All of your logins including exchange accounts and email addresses should have 2-factor authentication (2FA) activated.
This extra verification step is vital, as it almost infinitely reduces the chances of a hack via discovery of a password. Using 2FA means that even if a hacker somehow figures out your password, they’ll still need an additional code to get into your account.
6. Password manager
By now, you’ve probably clicked that it would be extremely tiresome to keep track of all these different accounts and passwords.
To keep them together and under control, it’s handy to keep your login details in a password manager – a secure app where you keep all your login details in one place.
Being a single point of failure, it goes without saying that a password manager is a vital place to have a strong password and 2FA – the last thing you want is someone gaining access to all of your passwords at once!
7. VPN
A virtual private network (VPN) service is an easy way to improve your security by preserving your identity. A VPN makes it appear that you’re browsing from another computer’s internet connection, which could be anywhere in the world.
This can vastly improve your anonymity and is especially handy to be used on unsecured public WiFi networks. VPNs can also provide an extra layer of security against malicious programs, viruses, and phishing attacks.
Do these things all together
Each one of these tips will add an additional layer of security to your crypto journey and will work best when they’re all conducted together.
Ideally, you should be setting up all of these things – not just one or two – especially if you have an amount of crypto that you would not be comfortable losing.
Just a short hour of setting up good security could save your future fortune from being taken out of your hands early, so if you have a spare minute, go through the list and implement these tips.
