4 Quick Tips to Increase Online Security and Protect Your Crypto Assets

We live in a digitized society where many daily transactions and business activities are conducted online. Sensitive information such as account information, personal data, and access to crypto assets are prone to cyber-attacks. Just recently on July 15th, an anonymous attacker got access to several high-profile Twitter accounts and sending hoax giveaways messages to users. The infamous event quickly gained widespread attention as the compromised accounts include notable individuals such as Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and former United States president Barrack Obama.

Practicing “cyber hygiene” will help increase the security of your crucial information and crypto-assets. By following a series of best practices in securing your online data, you’re safeguarding confidential information and funds from cyber-attacks and hacks. To help you with that, here are four things that you can do to increase your online security.

Use Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

Also known as multi-factor authentication, two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security measure in which users provide two different authentication factors to verify their identity. There are few different types of 2FA, such as one-time password (OTP), time-based tokens, or a physical token on top of the existing password or passcode. Enabling 2FA will protect both the user’s credentials and the underlying data or resources. It’s been growing in popularity in the last few years because of its higher level of security compared to single-factor authentication that only requires a password or passcode to access the user’s platform or account.

At Hodlnaut, we take security seriously and encourage all of our users to enable 2FA for their interest account. Users are required to enable 2FA in the KYC process and to make a withdrawal at Hodlnaut.

Beware of Phishing Emails and Scams

Have you ever received an email that looks legitimate, but once you’ve paid closer attention, it’s not? And it’s getting harder to differentiate phishing emails nowadays. It used to be quite easy to identify with email openings such as “Greetings from Price Nigeria,” but now phishing emails are meticulously designed to look legitimate at a glance. Companies and individuals are often targeted by scammers who send convincing emails and pretend to be from legitimate organizations or companies.

One way to identify the legitimacy of these emails that look important and urgent is to see the opening lines. It should address you directly and not with “Dear User/Customer.” You also need to pay attention to the sender’s domain address because scammers may mimic the email address in a way that you can’t quickly notice; for example, h0dlnaut.com is fake, and hodlnaut.com is the real one.

Pay Attention to the URLs

Many companies often use link shortener services like TinyURL or Bitly to shorten their URL links, mainly for tracking and analytics purposes. However, it’s easy to be manipulated by hackers who would use what appears to be a shortened link with virus and malware. It’s also helpful to note the subdomain link. A subdomain is essentially an additional part of the site’s domain. For example, at Hodlnaut, we have blog.hodlnaut.com or mail.hodlnaut.com, which are legitimate subdomains. The word “blog” and “mail” is the subdomain and “hodlnaut” is the primary domain whereas “.com” is the top-level domain.

Make Sure it’s SSL Certified

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a widely used technology to secure the internet connection and safeguard sensitive data transmitted between two systems. SSL prevents bad actors from accessing and modifying any transmitting data, which often includes personal details. Websites that do not have SSL certificates are prone to attacks because they don’t adopt this technology to safeguard their connection and data. You can tell whether a website has an SSL certificate by looking at the padlock icon located just before the domain address on your web browser. It should look like this:

At Hodlnaut, our platform runs on a secure cloud infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and all traffic is encrypted with SSL encryption.

We take security very seriously and do everything we can to keep all accounts secured and safe at Hodlnaut. By practicing cyber hygiene, you can help increase the security of your sensitive information and protect your crypto assets from hackers.