National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Cybercrime affects both large corporations and private individuals. You’ve likely read about the significant data breaches in the business world. The cost of these crimes could increase by 175 percent from the last record, five years earlier.¹

What can you do to help protect your accounts against data breaches? 

For most private individuals, the key idea is to:

• Know what to do if you’ve had a data breach
  
  
• Know what you can do that might help prevent a data breach

Total cybersecurity for your financial matters isn’t something that can be strategized in a single message like this, but I would like to offer you two suggestions to help you get started. Both can be done from home and represent reactive and preventative measures.

Credit Freeze. By reactive, I mean a step you can take after the fact. A credit freeze might react to identity theft or a data breach. It specifically restricts access to your credit report, which has information that could be used to open new lines of credit in your name. The freeze prevents this, but it will not prevent a criminal from, for instance, using an active credit card number if they’ve discovered it. For that reason, you still have to monitor for unauthorized transactions during the freeze. 

While the freeze is in place, you can still get your free annual credit report. You also won’t have issues with credit background searches for job or renter’s applications, or when you buy insurance – the freeze doesn’t affect those areas of your credit history. This can be done through a call to the big three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) or by visiting their websites. 

Password Manager. This is a preventative measure. Yes, we all know the poor soul who uses “Password” as their password. While you are probably not that far gone, the truth is that cybercrooks use many tricks to learn or intuit our passwords. A few people, against best practice, will use the same password across each account. A good security measure against that is password manager software – applications that allow us to keep all our numerous passwords encrypted in a vault and drop them into our browsers when requested. While yes, there are options to save these passwords, encrypted on most browsers, these security measures are limited. Password managers are focused solely on security and are more frequently updated than browser security features are; that attention might differ between a criminal obtaining access to your sensitive personal information or being blocked in the attempt. 

While this is a very basic pair of tips, they are worth considering and may help prevent identity theft. There are, however, additional, more advanced choices for you to explore. Read up and take action!

^Source:

^{1. SentinelOne.com, March 28, 2025}