5 Pre­cious Things You Don’t Want Any­one To Find When They Hack Into Your Computer

When­ever we go on­line we are putting our­selves and our busi­ness at risk. One of the main rea­sons is be­cause any great hacker could find their way into your computer.

They might send you an email and if you open it a virus will in­stall key­log­ging soft­ware in the back­end of your ma­chine. They could break into your com­puter through an un­se­cure Wi-Fi net­work. There are lots of ways they could do it, but the re­sults are al­ways the same.

Once some­one has ac­cess to the in­side of your com­puter they will find every­thing you want to keep a secret.

You could be in real trou­ble be­cause some­one with your pri­vate and busi­ness data could do any­thing with it. Maybe you don’t un­der­stand how se­ri­ous this is, so let’s take a look at some of the things they could find. Af­ter read­ing this you will prob­a­bly do every­thing you can to make sure your com­puter is com­pletely secure.

Any im­por­tant documents

How many im­por­tant doc­u­ments do you have on your hard drive? If you run your busi­ness from your com­puter it’s pos­si­ble you keep every­thing on there. Do you have any doc­u­ments you don’t want to fall into the wrong hands? Would you be able to keep the busi­ness go­ing if some­one deleted them? The eas­i­est way to stop that from hap­pen­ing is­n’t to save them in more than one place. It’s to stop peo­ple from gain­ing ac­cess to your com­puter in the first place.

Your pass­words

We are all liv­ing two lives whether you want to be­lieve it or not. In one life we have a home and in or­der to pro­tect it we lock it up with a key. It stops any­one from get­ting in­side. In our other life, the one in­side the com­puter, we lock it up with pass­words. These pass­words are some­times more valu­able than the key to your home. If any of your pass­words fall into the hands of a hacker they could cause se­ri­ous trou­ble. It’s not even worth think­ing about and you know you must stop it from happening.

Per­sonal details

One of the most hor­ri­ble things in the world is pick­ing up the phone and hav­ing to be told some­one has spent thou­sands of dol­lars in your name. They want to be you in or­der to spend your money, but they dis­ap­pear when it’s time to pay it back. Once some­one knows a few key de­tails about you they can eas­ily use it against you. You need to re­mem­ber that these peo­ple who try to turn your life up­side down are pro­fes­sion­als, so they are best avoided at all costs.

Naked pho­tos

If you have any naked pho­tos on your com­puter I bet you would­n’t like any­one to get a hold of them. You see the dam­age it causes celebri­ties every week, but it could hap­pen to you too. They prob­a­bly would­n’t send your naked pho­tos to the news­pa­per, but they could use them to black­mail you. If they had ac­cess to your so­cial me­dia ac­counts they could also splash your bare bum across them for every­one to see, just be­cause they think it would be funny.

Your in­ter­net history

You might not go on any adult sites, but what if you did? It won’t mat­ter if you’re sin­gle be­cause you have no­body to an­swer to, but I bet your wife would­n’t like it if she found out what you had been look­ing at when she was in bed. If some­one knows about the web­sites you fre­quent they could eas­ily try to black­mail you. Don’t think it won’t hap­pen to you be­cause I’m sure that is what every­one thinks be­fore they end up on the re­ceiv­ing end of a blackmailer.

We’ll ex­pand on this topic in our up­com­ing se­ries on cyber-crime.