College campuses are rife with students who underestimate the importance of web security, which is why their servers are also rife with all kinds of hackers and malware. As a college student, you have to be sure to protect yourself in every way that you can from having your digital privacy violated, or even worse, being the victim of identity theft or fraud. In order to protect yourself, you have to take a few basic precautions that everyone should know. Here is how to keep your digital life secure on campus in college.
Password Protect Everything
From your smartphone, to your tablet, to your laptop, you need to keep absolutely every one of your devices password protected at all times. Ideally, you want to have separate passwords for all of them so that if someone discovers the password on one device they won’t gain access to all of your devices. Everyone who buys a computer for college needs to make sure that their computer is password protected, because there will be times when your roommate will have friends over and you will be in the bathroom or shower, and you don’t want all of your personal information to be put on blast.
Always Logout of Campus Computers
Most colleges like Northwestern University will have campus computers available all over campus and you will be provided with a personal login for these computers. Once you are done with the computer you always want to make sure that you not only logout of all of your accounts and close down all programs or applications that you were using, but you also want to logout of the computer altogether. It only takes a quick history search to get right back into information that you searched previously on that computer if you don’t logout.
Change Your Passwords Periodically
You also want to make sure that you are updating all of your passwords from time to time. As a standard rule, you should change all of your passwords every semester. Some viruses and malware programs will take quite a bit of time to discover your passwords and gain access to your accounts, but once they do it will be extremely hard to keep them out. That’s why you need to keep changing those passwords and try to make them as complicated as possible with different characters and symbols.
Keep Your Login Information Stored on Paper
Of course, if you’re constantly changing your passwords, you’re going to need to keep all of that information stored somewhere. It takes time to remember all of your passwords, which is why you need a central place to reference all of them. You should find somewhere safe in your daily agenda or a personal notepad to write down all of your passwords so that they can’t be accessed by any kind of hacker or bot.
Purchase Encryption Software
Lastly, you want to make sure that you install some of encryption software for all of your devices so that all of your data will be encrypted from the moment that you start typing or opening files. This kind of software will be installed on all the UC servers, but that doesn’t mean that your personal computer will be protected while you’re earning one of UC’s nurse practitioner programs online.