.How to Secure Your Online Financial Accounts
How to Secure Your Online Financial Accounts
By Dirk Cotton The Retirement cafe
In my previous post, You're Responsible for Your Own Online Security, I noted that online fraud protections from banks, credit unions, investment companies, and other financial services companies are significantly weaker than consumer protections for credit cards, debit cards, ATMs, and EFTs.
The "100% online fraud guarantees" advertised by financial services companies can have a lot of fine print and they are backed by the companies, not by consumer protection laws.
You may be thinking, "That's a lot of trouble. In the unlikely event that my account is hacked, the financial services company will reimburse me." I think that's a mistake for a few reasons.
First, even if the company covers your losses, recovering from the fraud is unlikely to be a pleasant experience. Second, if you don't meet the company's security requirements spelled out clearly on their websites, you might not be covered by their online fraud guarantee, at all. Do you want to take that risk with your savings?
My goals for this post don't include boring you to tears, though that is certainly a risk when one explains technology to people who just want things to work. The truth is that Internet passwords don't work. We need a very different solution for securing online access but unless and until we get that, we have to work with what's available.
One of my goals is to help you avoid losing your hard-earned wealth to online fraud. A second goal is to help you avoid the long, painful process of recovering from online fraud when recovery is possible — you'll find it much easier to stop fraud before it happens than to tidy up afterward.
And, my third goal is to keep you from running afoul of requirements that might preclude those "100% online fraud guarantees" offered by financial services companies. I used to refer to them as "online financial services companies" but now almost all of them are.
I warn you up front that some of these measures can be complicated to implement and that they will complicate your financial life a bit. It won't be as easy for you to access your online financial services but it should be a lot more difficult for a thief to do so.
And finally, before diving into security measures, be aware that many online services offer different levels of security that you can implement depending on how much set-up work you are willing to do and how much inconvenience you will tolerate to achieve greater security.
You can improve security significantly with stronger passwords, for example. With more work and complexity, you can greatly improve on long-password security by adding two-factor authentication.
You will need to decide if the extra security is worth the effort. You might also think, "This is way too difficult. I'm just going to avoid online access to my accounts altogether."
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http://www.theretirementcafe.com/2019/08/how-to-secure-your-online-financial_6.html