what if I told you that you could pretty much eliminate any chance of ever getting hacked
again the title might seem like an exaggeration but it's kind of true that most of the time 99%
of time anytime you get hacked or get a virus on your computer it could have easily been avoided
so that's what we're gonna do today go over really simple and straightforward ways to reduce almost
completely the risk of getting your computer compromised and it's not that difficult to do
and really anyone can do it now before we begin I want to give a big thanks to the sponsor of this
video LastPass if you're not familiar LastPass is a password manager that securely stores all your
passwords for you so you only have to remember one master password you never have to go through
the trouble of looking for forgotten passwords or worry about being locked out of your accounts or
answering a bunch of security questions because it keeps track of everything for you both on desktop
and on the mobile apps it has and because it has a built-in password generator you don't even have
to spend time coming up with strong passwords yourself and then trying to remember that so it
also makes it easier to use unique passwords on every website which is extremely important and
something I will be covering later in this video LastPass basically puts your password security on
autopilot so you don't have to try and remember write down or reset your passwords if you can't
remember it just keeps track of everything in one secure place plus one of the main features
is that it fills in passwords for you on websites so you don't even have to type them in and another
cool feature is the ability to safely share your passwords with others through LastPass if someone
needs access to your accounts for example so every step of the way your data is protected and
conveniently accessible still as I've mentioned in the past this is actually the password manager
that I've always used anyway for several years now so I can genuinely recommend it and if you want to
check it out you can just go to lastpass.com and of course I'll put the link in the description
as well and now let's get into what you need to do to avoid getting hacked forever so the first
thing we should probably go over is what exactly do we mean by getting hacked right it has a few
different meanings and in this video I'm going to go over basically three different meaning
it could possibly have the first is like getting your account hacked someone breaking into your
online account when they shouldn't have access to it obviously the other meaning would be getting
a classic computer virus you download something you'll run it you shouldn't have and now someone
else has access to your computer and then the third might be a software exploit where you didn't
even necessarily do anything but your software was vulnerable and now someone was able to use that to
also install a virus whether it was a key logger or a rootkit to completely take over your computer
but the result is the same as a classical virus of course the other possibility is that someone
specifically goes in and targets you for hacking to hack into your specific computer but most of
the time 99% of time that is not the case you really do not have to worry about that unless
you're like a government official or something like that pretty much all the time what happens
is a online criminal which is cast an extremely large net and just use software and BOTS to do
the work for them they'll maybe upload the virus and whoever gets caught in that net that's who
they'll target so you really just want to focus on making yourself a more difficult target because
even then maybe if you are exposed to the virus then you still won't get infected because your
computer has better security in place so if you know how to protect yourself then you don't have
to worry about viruses because they're gonna focus on the easier targets now at this point
we're actually going to get into the practical stuff what can you do right now to fortify your
computer and this stuff is pretty basic the first couple things you know I've said this
a million times but it is true and I have to say it every time because it is essential it's
the most important thing and that is that you need to keep your operating system up-to-date
and you should use the latest version of your operating operating system that means if you
use Windows you should really upgrade to Windows 10 it is more secure than previous versions yes
Microsoft does release security patches for older versions like Windows 7 and Windows 8 as long as
it's still in that update time frame but they have introduced better security features into Windows
10 that windows 7 and Windows 8 just simply don't have and of course even if you do have a Mac also
applies to that it is always more secure to have the latest version of an operating system and you
keep up to date within that version and then install all the patches now most of the time
Windows and Mac will really keep you up to date automatically and I think Windows like forces you
to stay up to date so that's fine but you should really avoid delaying updates if you have the
option and of course you also need to keep your software up-to-date like your web browser you
are at so much higher risk if you don't update your OS and software because hackers are going
to write exploits for software where they've had more time to investigate it and if the software
is patched then that exploit is gonna go away so if you're one of the people who doesn't have it
updated you are going to be specifically targeted because here's the deal with software exploits you
can be victim of what is called a drive-by attack where if you're browsing the web and there's an
exploit on the website that takes advantage of your browser of it's out of date you could
be infected and taken over even if you didn't do anything specifically there could be code running
on that website that your browser executes without you actually clicking on anything and
then you're infected it doesn't matter how smart you are how clever you are at spotting viruses
because you literally didn't have to do anything to get infected in that situation and that's why
it's important to keep software up-to-date so that you don't get surprised by things where
you would normally be able to avoid completely alright so I think you get that point keep stuff
up-to-date and the next thing that you can apply right now is get some sort of antivirus hopefully
you have an antivirus if you think that you're too smart to get it remember what I said there
are some exploits that you might not even know you're doing but you get infected and antivirus
is gonna be your last line of defense it shouldn't be completely your only defense but it is a last
line of defense and there are plenty of good free ones even depending on when you watch this video
there might be better one so really just search for tests to see which antivirus is the best at
the time but in any case you probably want to get one that has some sort of internet security
it might be called a real time protection that will basically monitor files and requests from
websites and block anything that is potentially malicious and that again is going to protect you
from anything that could be coming through that you don't even know about and this is especially
important with so-called zero day exploits where even if you are completely up to date the bad
guys might find an exploit in some software before they're able to even be patched and then literally
everybody is exposed so there's a chance that your antivirus be able to block it with
so-called heuristics where it kind of detects the behavior of the software even if it isn't a known
virus and you can probably have some software protection there that's why it's so important
all right the next big topic we need to talk about is behavior and what you should be doing and being
aware of to avoid getting viruses and stuff like that and then the final section we talked about
is online account security but now we're gonna get into behavior but really best practices and
behavior are going to be the best antivirus you can get and there's a reason there's the common
joke that the best antivirus is common sense 2018 right it's knowing what to look out for and then
you can void most this stuff and won't even have to rely on antivirus even though you should have
it the first thing is pretty obvious but you need to be always aware of exactly what files
you're running and what types of files because a lot of times even if you are up to date if you
manually click and run a file then you're gonna get infected there's not much you can protect
against that and software wise that's just a bad behavior mistake so for example if you go on some
website and it just randomly starts downloading a file to your computer obviously do not run it and
more importantly get off that website especially if it's like a Exe file and you don't know why it
specifically downloaded that file you didn't try to download anything you should probably
get off that website so you don't know what else it's doing in the background if it was able to
initiate a download that you didn't want to so you might be fine if you didn't run the file but still
you don't want to deal with that at all now one setting that is extremely useful that's not even
on by default that you should enable is viewing all file extensions on your computer even if it's
a known file extension this will allow you to see exactly what type of file you're running now you
can enable this by going to Windows Explorer in Windows and then you go to the View tab and
then check the things as file name extensions so this way if you download a picture you're trying
to download a picture and then you notice that the file extension is dot exe well then obviously you
know that is not what it's supposed to be you can delete it get off that website and actually I have
a real-life example of this a long time ago I'll remember this forever because it was so clever I
actually downloaded a file and it was supposed to be a song right and the file was called
whatever dot mp3 and then I actually did have file extensions enabled and what this person did was
named the file dot mp3 and then a ton of spaces and then dot exe so first of all if you didn't
have file extensions enabled you wouldn't have seen that exe at all you would have thought it was
an mp3 file and even if I did have file extensions enabled they tried to hide it by putting a ton of
spaces luckily I saw that it was a virus and did not run it but that just goes to show you that
kind of trickery that people will use and even if you download a file it might not be exactly what
you think it is if it's not from a very reliable source if you're not super sure about a certain
file that you have on your computer a good website to use is called virustotal it's actually owned by
Google now and what you can do is upload this file and it will literally scan it with like
30 something different anti viruses so you can actually see whether or not it's a virus print
with pretty good accuracy depending on how many positive results it gets and sometimes it might
get some false Flags like if there's one random antivirus you've never heard of this says it's a
virus but everything else is green it's probably fine but it's a really good resource to have if
you're not sure about a virus and you don't really trust your current antivirus this will literally
scan it with everything all right now the next topic with behavior has to do the emails obviously
what a major source of virus is spreading and you need to remember here that it is some time just as
bad to simply open an email that could be a virus especially or more specifically if you have like
an outdated email client now Google and Gmail is really good at this typically they are very good
filtering out email but if you're using like Outlook or something or your work doesn't use
the latest version of Outlook then you need to be very careful who you're getting emails from
and maybe not even open it if you don't recognize it because there could be scripts in there that
again take advantage of that older software or you don't even have to run it and again running
attachments that you don't recognize even if it's a Word document is also bad there are exploits in
Microsoft Word older versions that could go out in spread itself outside of Microsoft Word using
an exploit and then you're affected on your whole computer so it's very important to remember that
a virus doesn't necessarily have to be an exe file there are other types it could use here's
an example that you might never have heard of VBS it's a script file extension and it can
execute code if you run it it will do something and potentially install a bigger badder virus
another one to be aware of is msi this is a Microsoft specific installer extension and
yes this is legitimately used all the time by real programs but know that this is something
that actually does something when you run it so if again you download it and you don't recognize it
don't think oh well it's not a Exe file it's fine an MSI file could just as well be something that
could install a virus so again don't do it if you don't know what it is another final example could
be a batch file dot baat kind of like VBS this is a scripting file extension that can do commands
on the command prompt so again just don't do this it could actually do something and expand itself
into a real virus using those software scripts all right now the final thing to be aware of
when you're just out and about using a computer is avoiding public Wi-Fi hotspots I have talked
about this in other videos you may already know this but remember that anytime a Wi-Fi
hotspot does not have a password that means that it is unencrypted I'm talking about a connection
we're not some sort of thing where you connect and then there's a login page that's totally
different it needs to be a password to actually connect otherwise that information is sent in
the clear and anyone sitting there with a laptop in the cafe or whatever can listen
to all the information being sent to and from people's computers and the router of course it
is important to remember that not all is lost if you absolutely have to use a public Wi-Fi hotspot
because most websites do use encryption if you go to website and it's an HTTPS in the browser that
means it is using encryption but it's not always a hundred percent if that website does not have the
encryption properly configured so if you're using a website like Google or your bank hopefully they
have it probably properly configured but still on other websites it's still better to be safe
and just not use it at all use your cellphone cellular connection if you can all right now
the final topic we're going to go over is website hacking this is most of the time what people mean
when they say all I got hacked just means someone broke into their account and the important thing
to remember is that most of the time when you get hacked on a website and someone breaks into
your account it's almost never the case that a criminal actually specifically hacked into that
website and then hacked into your account 99% of the time this is actually what happened probably
some random website that you signed up for a long time ago actually did end up getting hacked
someone broke into their website because they had poor security it was like a small website maybe
even a big website though and downloaded their entire password database if you're very unlucky
then that password database was unencrypted and they were stored in plain text so literally they
have everyone's email and password combinations if you are lucky then hopefully that website did
actually encrypt all the passwords in the database but in both cases the result is usually the same
that password database will be basically sold off or even leaked publicly so in the case where the
password database was just plain text unencrypted that means that hackers from all over the world
will now be trying those password email and pass combinations on tons of different websites and
see which ones work but here's the thing even if the passwords were encrypted the Packers
might actually try to decrypt them decrypt every individual password which is why if you have a
weak password they could easily brute-force it if it's just a single word all lowercase letters it's
not gonna take very long at all for that password to be cracked so this is exactly why you want a
long and strong password it's not so that hackers won't be able to guess your password typing into
the website that is not what you're doing you're protecting it against software that is trying to
brute-force your password and millions of times a second so then what happens next well let's say
that you had a weak password and it was easily decrypted by the hackers or even if you did
have a strong password it was stored in plain text because the website had bad security and
you had no control over that like I said before if you used the same password on multiple sites
chances are that hackers are going to try and use BOTS to literally try your password combination
and email on a whole bunch of different sites and see if it works and logs in to them specifically
very important sites like banks even and it's not necessarily just the person that broke into that
original website remember they might sell that database or leaked it and then you have people all
over the world trying your password combination everywhere and get this here's another interesting
thing you might not have even realized hackers did but if they get hold of a giant plaintext
pass or database they might do what is called a dictionary attack and use all those passwords
they know that are plaintext and use it to try and decrypt a large encrypted password database
they'll literally use the dictionary of passwords they know to try and brute force ones that they
don't so this for example means that even if you have a very strong password but someone else
used that same password then they might guess you correctly because someone else used that
password and that was added their dictionary and that matched up when they were decrypting
yours now the reason I'm telling you all this is because it's very important to understand
I websites might not be as secure as you think they are you trust a website oh I have a password
no one could get in but really you don't have to worry about just that wet say you have to worry
about every other website not getting hacked and even other people's passwords if it's the same as
yours so that is why specifically you need to do two things when it comes to a password you
need to have a unique password on every single site and it needs to be a strong password that
will protect you from both scenarios where if a password is stolen on one site can't be used on
any other site and hopefully that one website that was hacked will realize they were hacked
and forced password changes and then your password that you use there is useless in every other case
and if they do hack that website and it's actually encrypted then they won't even be able to get your
password anyway they might be able to get other people's passwords that were weak but they won't
even get yours regardless of course needless to say even if you did have a strong password that
was encrypted when it was stolen you should obviously change it and never use it again so
obviously this is a good reason to get something like LastPass that I mentioned in the beginning of
this video I have actually been using it for years so a good example is if you want to sign up for a
website that you don't really think you're gonna use very often just use it to generate a random
password that is very strong and then you don't have to remember it and it's random it's never
going to be used again obviously it's infinitely better than using the same password on every site
just so you don't want to remember them all all right so I think that covers everything hopefully
by now you should be much more informed and you should be prepare the next time some sort of virus
comes your way you'll know what to do or not even have to worry about it because you don't notice it
because you're completely up to date if you guys thought this video was really helpful I'd love
to hear what you think if you have any other tips that maybe I forgot to mention you can check down
there other people might have tips as well if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos
right here you just click on those and if you want to subscribe I make new videos every week so it
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subscribe button so thanks so much for watching guys I'll see you next time have a good one