Your financial information, such as your bank statements, business invoices, bills, tax returns and so on, is a very important part of your life that should never fall into the wrong hands. Everybody is used to not leaving paper bills and statements lying around, but a lot of people still underestimate the dangers of cyber crime. And that’s a big mistake, especially if you use your computer to do online banking and store electronic copies of your financial records.
Why You Should Protect Your Financial Records
People’s financial data and bank account numbers are the ultimate goal of almost every cyber criminal. Viruses, malware, keyloggers and other computer infections usually have one purpose – to grant the criminal access to your financial information. This information is then either used by the criminal himself, or sold to a third party. Definitely not something you’d want to happen to you or anyone in your family. That’s why you should protect your electronic financial records in the same way as you protect your paper statements, if not more.
How to Protect Your Financial Information
There are several things you can do to make your financial data more secure. The first measure you need to take is install a good quality antivirus program. Ideally, find a security suite that offers things like real-time protection and has identity theft protection features. Most paid antiviruses offer this kind of advanced protection, so you can choose the program you like.
The next step is to make sure your files are well-protected even if a criminal manages to gain access to them. The only way to make sure your files can only be accessed by you is to use encryption software to encrypt your financial data. While there are a lot of encryption programs out there, make sure you get the one that uses 256-bit AES encryption. That’s the government-approved encryption standard. SensiGuard is a good encryption program that’s advanced and easy to use at the same time.
And finally, you need to make sure your already deleted files that contain financial information can’t be recovered and used by cyber criminals. That’s why you need to use a file wiper to delete files that contain important information. A file wiper is a program that deletes files in such a way that they can’t be recovered by even the most advanced file recovery programs. This secure deletion is made possible by the way a file wiper works. Instead of movie the file to the Recycle Bin and marking it as deleted, a file wiper actually overwrites the file’s content with a special pattern of letters, numbers and symbols. This ensures that the file is completely destroyed and can’t be recovered by anyone.
Download our recommended file wiper to make sure your financial information never gets into the wrong hands.
