Do you sell photos or old latex outfits on the internet and wish to remain anonymous? Do you receive or travel for sessions? This article is for you.
SW social accounts are particularly targeted by attacks and it is essential for us to redouble precautions.
Billions of passwords were leaked in a recent big data breach. You have a 70% chance of being on that list. To be sure, check your email address on the free HaveIBeenPwned service. If you see a message explaining that your data has been leaked, it will be important to change all your passwords, not just the one from the leaked account.
You will think I’m a sadist but it is very important. You need long and different passwords for each account. The good news is that you don’t have to create them yourself or remember them. Use a password manager like Bitwarden. It is secure, open-source, and free. It syncs your passwords across all your devices and displays them to you when you enter them on a login page. It also generates very complex passwords that are impossible to hack in a lifetime. If you don’t want to use Bitwarden, your phone’s or browser’s default manager can do the job, but Bitwarden is still better.
The two-factor authentication (2FA) or multiple-factor authentication (MFA) implies that at each new connection on an app, physical validation is required. This physical validation either takes the form of a text message on your phone or a unique and temporary code generated on a specially designed application like 2FAS or Google Authenticator. 2FAS is free and fully open source (unlike Google’s software), which makes their solution even more secure. It is the one I currently use.
It is recommended to use at least a separate browser for your activity. Depending on the risk in your geographical area, different types of browsers may be recommended. If you don’t feel threatened by your laws, a browser like Firefox or Brave may do the trick. Firefox has more features but they need to be set up, while Brave handles privacy by default. Firefox is less controversial than Brave. If the threat level or risk involved is higher, then the Tor Browser will allow you to surf more anonymously on the Tor network, a network made up of multiple proxies to protect you. Just be careful, Tor is not a daily life browser. It is extremely slow and using it too much might make you look suspicious to your internet service provider. You can make Tor more private by using it with Tor Bridges.
A VPN allows you to hide your IP address from the sites you visit. It is strongly recommended to use one. A very interesting choice is Mullvad which is specifically designed to protect your anonymity. It is the one I use because they take it so far that they even allow you to pay anonymously, in bitcoin, or cash through the mail. For people who want free protection, Proton VPN offers limited functionality. It was designed by the people behind ProtonMail which we’ll talk about later. If you already pay for the Proton suite, the, Prooton VPN premium is already included which is great.
A DNS resolver translates the IP addresses of the sites you visit into their domain names. It is one of the essential tools for the proper functioning of the Internet as we know it but is relatively unknown to the general population. Your resolver is probably provided by your ISP or Google but it is recommended to change it. This task is by far the easiest to accomplish. You just have to change a parameter in your Wifi settings. Quad9 offers a quick guide to changing your DNS resolver to one that respects your anonymity. You may notice that you see fewer ads once switching to Quad9.
It is recommended to use an encrypted email provider like ProtonMail or Tutanota to protect you and your customers from potential data leaks. ProtonMail and Tutanota apply end-to-end encryption that makes your emails unreadable by any entity that might hypothetically manage to intercept them. It remains limited by the lack of encryption on the receiver’s end but at least, you did the right thing.