Lesson 7. How else can your data be stolen.

You’ve already completed some of our lessons, so you won’t be easily fooled now. You won’t enter bank card details on a website with a suspicious address, and won’t fall for the tricks of phoney bank employees or tax inspectors.

Nevertheless, your data is still at risk. After all, deception is not the only way to get hold of it – another method is theft. For this, cybercriminals have various technical means at their disposal.

Those aimed specifically at stealing bank card data are called banking Trojans, which we covered in Lesson 2. But there are also “multidiscipline” tools. For example, spyware. These programs can steal your login credentials, record telephone conversations, steal messages, and transfer it all to their handlers... They know where you go and can even take videos! And it’s all done on the sly.

What can guard you against spyware? A reliable antivirus. It will catch most malicious programs before they have time to wreck anything.

However, cybercriminals can steal data even without infecting the target device. Imagine you’re sitting in a cafe or departure lounge at an airport. And then you remember that you forgot to pay a very important bill! Fortunately, free Wi-Fi is available where you are. You connect and log into your online bank account... But the router distributing the Wi-Fi is under the control of cybercriminals, and they can see all the data you send to the bank server, including your username and password.

How to protect yourself? Do not enter sensitive data when you are connected to public Wi-Fi. Read the news or Wikipedia, fine. But buy something or log into an account? No way!

If you can’t delay your online purchase, use a VPN. That will securely encrypt all the information you send. Even if the bad guys intercept it, they will not be able to read it. So your money and data will stay safe.

So as not to forget about VPN at the critical moment, use Kaspersky Secure Connection – this solution checks all networks and reminds you to protect your connection as and when required. We’ll talk in more detail about VPNs and how they work in Lesson 12 of the Data Protection and Privacy course.