By MarlĂş Abarca
According to United Health, the Change Healthcare data breach that occurred in February 2024 affected around 190 million people. If you were one of these people, you might have received a letter from Change Healthcare informing you of the potential exposure of your data such as your contact information like your phone number and email address, and more sensitive information like your name, address, date of birth, and perhaps even your SSN.
Stopping a cyberattack is difficult, but there are things you can do to protect yourself against scammers. If you haven’t taken steps to protect your data and privacy, here are six tips to protect yourself today:
- Beware what you share online – Consider the privacy settings on your social media accounts. Scammers can use the information you share on your social media accounts publicly to create a profile about you and make it easier to scam you.
- Granting permissions to sites and apps can be risky – Likewise, consider what data you give up when you accept data tracking on websites you visit. Information on your searches, purchase histories, your IP address, and location is sometimes shared with third parties for profit, and you never know what they want to do with your data. Same goes for the apps on your devices. Make a habit of checking what permissions you grant your apps! It also wouldn’t hurt to read the entire terms and conditions!
- Long and complex passwords are best – you should know better than to continue using “password” as your password! Scammers are relying on us to make mistakes so they can easily access and make money by selling our using our data. The best passwords include a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.
- Two-step verification is worth it the inconvenience – Change Healthcare data breach was the largest healthcare data breach in history. Can you guess how scammers gained access to millions of records of sensitive data? Multi-factor authentication was not in place. It is estimated that over 70% of healthcare data breaches involve human error or the misuse of credentials, making two/step verification incredibly important for guarding sensitive data.
- Free internet doesn’t mean safe internet connection – Beware of public free Wi-Fi connections! Scammers can use these connections to steal your data and access your devices. You can use a VPN (virtual private network) for a secure and encrypted connection between your device and that free public internet. Using a VPN also allows you to access geo-restricted content that might only be available in certain regions.
- Don’t click strange links – Lastly, make sure that you are suspicious of links from unfamiliar sources or that don’t match the name of the website. A safe way to know if a link will take you to your intended destination is by hovering your mouse over the link to see the entire web address. For government websites, make sure this web address doesn’t contain typos or “.com” instead of “.gov”.