5 Must-Have Tools to Secure Your Digital Life

As an internet user, you should be using many different tools to help with securing your online activities and hide your private information from prying eyes and cybercriminals. Any security tool that stops you from getting compromised is a life-saver.

And there are countless reasons why you need to do that, protecting your self, your identity, and your private information should be of the utmost importance.

Government surveillance agencies, ISPs, and hackers are always looking to learn more about your online behavior, your browsing history, and your personal data – you shouldn’t make it easy for them to do that.

In today’s post, you will learn the different tools that you can use to enhance your online security and protect your digital life.

1. Encrypted Messaging Apps

Encryption is really crucial if you want to protect your data and private messages, even if you’re just chatting about random stuff with your family or friends, you never want a 3rd-party company to be able to spy on your messages.

Encryption technology helps with that by using an algorithm to encode data and make it completely unreadable and non-understandable, unless you have an encryption key or password to unlock and decrypt the data to uncover the hidden data inside it.

This is an ultra-secure process that helps with keeping your data secure from hackers or anyone trying to get access to your private information such as peer-to-peer (P2P) text messages.

There are some popular end-to-end encrypted messaging apps out there that you can install on your devices such as Signal, a popular text messaging app designed to keep your message secure and encrypted.

”I use Signal every day”, said privacy advocate Edward Snowden.

WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging app has also released the end-to-end encryption protocol in their latest versions of the App.

”WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you’re communicating with can read what is sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp”, said the Facebook-owned company.

2. Encrypted Email

Many people nowadays use the Google email app called Gmail, or Microsoft email to access and read their emails. Everyone is doing it and no one really knows whether those popular apps or websites are secure or not.

As a rule of thumb, if it’s popular and everyone knows it, it’s probably not secure. Even worse, these large corporations that provide you with that email service are probably spying on your email messages and selling your data to 3rd-party advertisers.

So what should you do instead? A secure and end-to-end encrypted email service provider would be the best alternative. ProtonMail is one of the most popular encrypted email providers, in addition to encryption, ProtonMail also provides privacy and anonymity features to their users, which makes it one of the best and most secure alternatives to other popular email service companies.

3. Two-Factor Authentication

While still not a popular solution, 2-factor authentication is a great way to secure most of your accounts online. Two-factor authenticator (or 2FA)  is an extra level of security employed to provide more security to users online.

With 2FA, hackers or cybercriminals will need more than your email and password to access your online accounts. Considering the nature of two-step verification, this will make it extremely hard for anyone to gain access to your accounts without your knowledge.

Many websites and services have started to introduce 2FA to increase the security of their user’s accounts, you can setup a 2FA service on most of your online accounts such as Facebook, email, and many others.

4. HTTPS Everywhere

We all know that small green lock key symbol on the top left of our computer screen is a sign that makes us feel comfortable when we’re visiting a website.

Websites that use HTTPS or SSL security certificates use end-to-end encryption to protect their user’s data and other sensitive information.

But what will you do if a website doesn’t have one? luckily, there is a browser extension available called HTTPS Everywhere that automatically switches many sites you visit to secure ”https” even if they don’t have that available.

5. A Virtual Private Network

A virtual private network or a VPN is a must-have tool for every internet user. Browsing the web with your IP address and real-time location exposed is highly risky. Most internet companies that you’re using without a VPN are probably selling your personal data and browsing behaviors to advertisers and other 3rd-parties.

A VPN service helps encrypt your data and hide your location to ensure complete privacy, anonymity, and protection from cybercriminals.

But when it comes to quality VPN services, free options have limited resources and they’re usually less secure, a premium VPN service like VPNExpress has military-grade security technology designed to secure and protect your data while browsing the web anonymously.