Tag: security

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Charge Your Stuff Anywhere, Anytime

I’ve just returned from personal travel to India and wanted to share with you a few tips I learned along the way. There’s no need to be tethered to a charging station at the airport or miss an important call or suffer from a dead camera battery. Portable power packs are more practical and better than ever at keeping you charged anytime, anywhere!

My husband bought an Anker PowerCore 20000 with Quick Charge 3.0, 20000mAh Power Pack Portable Charger with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0, for Samsung and iPhones from Amazon before our trip and it was worth its weight in gold!

This portable power pack fits in my purse and charges two devices at a time and only needs a recharge after several days use. I was able to charge smartphones and even my camera all while on the go. Just make sure that when you travel you put the power pack in your carry on as it should not go into packed luggage.

What I liked most was we were able to use the powered up charger on the go for about 3 or four days straight without having to charge up the power pack up again.  Sometimes at hotels we simply charged with the power pack and not even a wall charger.

I am not being paid for this review, just wanted to share a cool travel tool with you that has really worked for me.

 

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What Are You Doing to Beef Up Your Mobile Security?

Expect the unexpected.
Expect the unexpected and stay secure even on your mobile devices.

Recently my husband’s identity was stolen and my access to our bank account was hacked.

In my husband’s case a credit card was opened in his name.

In my case my online bank user name, password and PIN was used to raise credit limits and then steal over $3,000 from our checking account.

Our bank took care of the matter, but what was problematic was just how robbers got access to my own personal online access information.

The only thing we can think of is that I was using mobile banking features and may have accessed my bank while I was connected away from my home base.

As a result, here are the things that I have done to improve my mobile security.

1. My entire family now uses on their mobile devices face or voice recognition biometrics to access our most important bank. For our other bank, we use two step verification. All family members use two step verification via text messages to smartphones to access bank accounts online through desktops.

2. My entire family now has withdrawal, deposit and transaction alerts set up for banking, savings accounts, and credit cards. The focus is to catch robbers early before too much damage has been done.

3. I personally am using NordVPN which is a subscription base security tool for my smartphone that encrypts my communication on mobile data or when I am connected to any Wi-Fi hotspots out of my office. This will be especially important to me as I will be traveling in the months to come and this secure tunnel will allow me to encrypt data I exchange on the internet, geomask my location as well as to prevent eavesdroppers from snatching my user names and passwords.

Stay safe when you are online with your smartphone and encourage your family members to embrace new levels of mobile security to prevent the headaches that happened to us.

If you don’t want to move to a subscription service for security, Opera has just announced a free VPN for smartphones that is very simple to use. You can download it at Google Play or iTunes.

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Watching Your Site for Malware Intrusions

Website owners need to keep an eye on their website and blog to make sure that they are not unknowingly spewing malware onto the Web. Not only can this be bad for your site visitors, but you can actually get your website blocked by Google for allowing malware downloads; even if you didn’t know that it was happening.

If you have a blog on your site, there are lots of free, cool plugins that monitor your blog and help you to keep it safe, but how about a website? I found one tool recently that allows you to scan your website files for malware. It is called Sucuri. You can visit the free online website scanner here. I recommend not only scanning your root directory, but some of your top traffic directories as well just to make sure you are malware free.

Another tool you can use for malware monitoring of a website is the Google Webmaster Control Panel. To use this Google service you will need to verify your website ownership by downloading and then uploading to your server a small file. Once in place, Google will scan your site and you can review its malware detection results.

In many cases I have found that Google is very slow to report if you have had a malware attack. Eventually they will notify you if there is a problem, but it may be woefully late, and your notification may actually be that Google has banned your site in their index. I personally recommend a much more proactive and early prevention focus.