Bank Safe: Protect Your Online Accounts
by Madelyn McConnell
October 31, 2022
We hope you’ve been following along with our #BankSafe fraud awareness series. For our final topic, we’ve got some easy tips to protect your online accounts.
People can become victims of account takeover when criminals gain access to their online accounts and exploit them. It’s the most common form of identity theft and usually happens through automated hacking or data breaches.
We here at GSB do all that we can on our end to protect you against account takeover, but here are a few ways you can be proactive to keep all your online accounts safe.
Be Unique with Your Passwords
Who would ever want to be just like everyone else? With passwords, that’s doubly the case! When choosing a password, don’t use obvious choices like “password” or “12346.” You also want to avoid including personal information like your birthdate. Instead, one tip is to think of personally significant phrases, like a song lyric or a line from a poem.
Another common mistake people make is using the same username and password for multiple accounts. This makes you susceptible to certain automated kinds of attacks like credential stuffing. So, say no to reusing the same password across ten accounts and make every password special.
Password Management
If you have trouble coming up with and remembering all those different passwords, try a password manager, an application that suggests and saves individual, strong passwords for each login. And if that’s not for you, experts say you can still go old school and write your passwords down on a piece of paper – so long as you keep that piece of paper in a secure place.
Enable Multi-factor Authentication
Sometimes you need more than a password. You can enable multi-factor authentication on your accounts to add an extra layer of protection. This will add another step to the login process, providing another line of defense against bad actors. And MFA is effective: according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, enabling MFA makes you 99% less likely to be hacked!
Grand Savings Bank has fraud detection services built into your GSB account. The number for the Grand Savings Bank Fraud Center is 800-237-8990. We recommend you save that number in your phone, so you know to answer when you see them calling. And if you’re concerned you’ve been the target of a data breach, follow the steps we have outlined here.
We here at GSB want to help you stay safe against all forms of fraud. Check out the other blogs in our #BankSafe series to learn more.
