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Dr. Alan Rea, professor of business information systems and an expert in cybersecurity, notes where you should focus your efforts in personal data security to keep the season festive and free from holiday hackers.

Phishing

Watch out for “scarcity emails” indicating few items in stock for a certain period. They encourage you to quickly click a link to claim or order an item. These are almost always ploys to collect logins, passwords and credit card information.

Emails from organizations asking for donations with embedded links should get careful scrutiny. Social engineering plays on our desire to help those less fortunate at the holidays. These links can steal financial or other personal data, so be very careful in vetting requests.

Phishing is not only via email. Mobile messages and social media posts use these tactics as well and rely on you trusting those in your personal networks.

Credit Cards

When possible, use either your NFC payment option with your smart phone (Apple Pay, Android Pay) or a credit card with a smart chip in it to make purchases. When you use these payment methods, they generate one-time purchase transactions that do not give out your credit card information.

New Technology

If you are purchasing a new phone, laptop, gaming console or anything that needs to connect to the internet, either unpack and update it before gifting it or require it to be the first thing that happens once it is unboxed.

If the technology doesn’t need to be immediately connected, make sure to change any default passwords.

Looking Forward

As our devices and toys become more sophisticated and always connected with each other and the internet, we need to update technology and set passwords before allowing anything to be online for any period of time. Attackers know the weaknesses of most devices and use automated means to attack new devices and get on your network!