I was hacked: Tips to protect yourself

I was careless with my internet security.

I was working one morning and went to get a personal file from my network drive. The file was locked and inside the folder was a file called “readme to unlock”. My heart sank… oh no I had been hacked. My life was on that drive… panic! switch it off… disconnect from the internet!! too late… I had been infected with the eCh0raix ransomware and my files were gone. 😱

I learnt the hard way that hacking is real and can impact individuals just as much as large corporations.

Backup of backups

Five years earlier I suffered an incident where I lost all my files due to a hard-drive failure.

That was a really tough lesson as all the photos of my kids growing up was on that drive. Luckily I learnt an important lesson and started to apply the practice of multiple backups.

By planing for the worst situation, both physical or remote loss of data, you can make sure your precious files and memories are preserved. Thankfully I had my drive remotely backed up and was able to recover all my files after the hack, I can’t imagine the massive consequences if I had not done this.

How to back up your backups.

#1. Cloud backup.

Nowadays, there are many fantastic cloud backup systems;

Google Drive, Apple Cloud, Microsoft One-drive.

These systems can be set up to automatically copy and backup your critical information.

#2. Hard-drive Mirroring.

To protect from hard-drive failure, when setting up your home storage system you can install a second drive and use a process called RAID mirroring. This makes your system write identical copies of all data to both drives, and hence provides a redundancy.

Even better than backing up is to stop from being hacked in the first place.

Make sure to use two-factor authentication (2FA).

Passwords are so easy to defeat, there are entire databases of usernames and passwords published on the dark web every day. You cannot rely on passwords as your only defence. Make sure to enable 2FA on every critical online service you use.

🌎 The internet is fantastic, you can communicate and connect with people across the globe. This also means that if an e-mail/password combination is discovered the whole world can access your personal information. With 2FA the chance of you being the victim of a hack or ransomware falls to almost zero.

There are many forms of 2FA here are some key ones you can use in order of security.

#1. E-mail or SMS.

📧 When logging in you will be requested to enter a code that is either e-mailed or sent by text message. This provides a good level of protection but unfortunately if your e-mail account is compromised or your sim card is spoofed this can be defeated.

#2. Authentication Apps.

📵 Apps like Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator are used to generate a code on your phone. This means an attacker would physically have to access your phone, not very easy.

#3. Buy a hardware authenticator key.

🔑 Companies such as Yubikey offer hardware devices the size of a key that has to be physically attached to the device you are logging in from. This is the method I use and the strongest form of 2FA.  

Securing your precious information online is easy with 2FA, don’t make the same mistake I made, it only takes a few clicks!