How to Secure Laptop from Hackers?

Last Updated on 2 years by Touhid

Laptop security is refer to the process of protecting the laptop from theft and unauthorized access. In this post we will discuss on how to secure laptop from hackers and unauthorized access.

How to Secure Laptop From Hackers

A laptop stores your sensitive data such as image, document, software, financial data. So, it is very important to secure your laptop from hackers or unauthorized access. There are several important tips which will help you how to secure laptop from hackers, which are as follows:

1. Create a Strong Password
2. Use Unique Password
3. Use antivirus software
4. Don’t Visit Porn Sites
5. Careful use of USB devices
6. Lock Your Computer
7. Avoid installing software from unknown sources
8. Never deactivate your antivirus
9. Ignore spam email
10. Scans Regularly for Virus
11. Use a firewall
12. Back Up Your Data
13. Use data encryption

1. Create a Strong Password

How to secure laptop from hackers? You should use a very strong password to protect your laptop from hacking. We are using very simple password to remember in our memory like as date of birth, mobile no, employee id, and 123456, which is one of the vital reasons for attacks. So, create a strong password for your laptop and change on a regular basis (i.e., Between 30 and 180 days).

• The password length should at least 10 characters long.
• The password must have uppercase letters (A – Z), lowercase letters (a – z), numbers (0 – 9), and special character (@, #, $, %, ^, (,), &, *!).

So, create a strong and standard password to secure your laptop from hackers.

Tips

To creating a strong password you can combine letters, numbers, special characters (minimum 10 characters in total) and change them on a regular basis.

For example: K$iuT&89%; is a strong and standard password.

Learn More about How to create a strong password?

2. Use unique Password 

IT security experts recommend that use strong and unique passwords for each account. If you use one password for all accounts and if a cyber-attacker gets access to your one account then attacker will also get access all other accounts.

Tips

So, if you want to protect your sensitive and business information from attacker, then it’s important to use a separate, strong and unique password for each account.

For example:

• Laptop login -> Use strong and unique password
• Email account –> Use strong and unique password
• Face book account –> Use strong and unique password

3. Use antivirus software

How to secure laptop from hackers? You should use an antivirus software which will helps to secure laptop from viruses, malware, Trojan horses, and others cyber threats. It scans every file which comes through the internet, USB devices or external hard disk to your laptop and helps to protect your system.

Tips

• You should use professional anti-virus software such as Bitdefender, Norton, Kaspersky, Panda, ESET, Avast, AVG and keep updated with update version.

4. Don’t Visit Porn Sites

Porn websites are one of the most common places to catch a virus or malware and the traffic of porn websites are increasing day by day. There are lots of advertisements on porn websites and which looks very attractive. Since attacker are skilled software engineer so, they hack the advertisements servers and include the malware in those advertisements. When a user visits a porn site and clicks on advertisements, then he gets infected by the malware.

If you visits and click on that advertisements then you may infected by a malware such as Keylogger which is a type of spying technology or system monitor software that recording user keystrokes to steal passwords and other sensitive information. It can record instant messages, email, and capture any other information at any time using keyboard.

Tips

If you want to safe your laptop from malware, so please don’t visit and click on the advertisements and banners.

5. Careful use of USB devices

The USB devices are very easy medium to transfer data from one device to another. The uses of external USB devices can easy harm to your laptop and system. So, you have to be very careful before plugging them into laptop or any other devices.

Tips

• Don’t use the same USB devices for home and office laptops
• Don’t plug unknown USB devices into your laptop
• Make sure your antivirus software working properly and keep up to date.
• And ensure that all external devices are come from a reliable source. If you feel, there has any suspicious file then please scan it by antivirus software.

6. Lock Your Computer

If attacker gets access your laptop, so attacker can steal your sensitive information or can inject a malware to your laptop.

Tips

• To safe your sensitive information on a laptop, so don’t use an automatic login feature that saves your user name and password.
• It is better always log off when you are out of from your laptop.

7. Avoid Installing software from unknown Sources

When downloading and installing software from external source, we don’t need to check the source is trusted or not. The problem is that many external sources are not safe to downloading the software. If you choose to download software and install it yourself, you could be putting malware on your laptop.

Tips

• So, before downloading and installing software, first you have check the source site is trusted by Secure Socket Layer (SSL) such as https://cyberthreatportal.com
• It is better to download your software either from the systems store or the vendor’s site.

8. Never deactivate your Antivirus

When you are installing software and ask for disabling your antivirus software that means the software is pirated or malicious software. This type of software may also contain viruses or Trojans or ransomware and any other such malware.

Tips

• So, never disable or deactivate your anti-virus for such software’s.
• It is proved that, legitimate software would never ask you to disable your anti-virus. If your software is legitimate, and you still face this situation, you should contact to your vendor to overcome this problem.

9. Ignore spam email

The spam emails are usually advertisements or are commercial in nature, but sometimes may contain website links that lead to phishing sites or include malware as file attachments.

In addition, that type of email scams are trying to get your sensitive information such as bank details, login credentials, credit card details or steal your identity.

Tips

Here are some ways to protect you from spam email:

• Try to avoid opening the spam emails
• Do not clicking on links in spam messages.
• Or think before you click on the link
• Do not reply to spam messages.
• Download spam filtering tools and use anti-virus software
• Do not provide your personal or business email address.
• Better to delete the spam emails

Learn more about How to stop Spam Email?

10. Scans Regularly for Virus

If a virus gets access your laptop and not removed in a timely manner, then it can cause a serious problems such as you can lose your important data, your login credentials, financial data or you identity.

Tips

• If you regularly browse or use the Internet, then you need to run a virus scan every day and if you’re not able to scan every day, then at least run a scan once a week.
• It is better, to setup a schedule in your anti-virus software to run a scan late at night or whenever you don’t use your laptop.

11. Use a firewall

A firewall is a security tools which is designed to monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic based on security rules and protects network system. Its main purpose is to create an obstacle between internal and external network in order to block malicious threats.

If your laptop ports are open, then a malicious code can sent by an attacker and gain unauthorized access. A windows firewall can acts as a simple defence by closing all ports.

Tips

In Windows operating system, this can be found by navigating to:

• First, Choose Start→ Control Panel→ System and Security→ Windows Firewall.
• Then, click the Turn Windows Firewall On or off link in the left pane of the window.
• Select the Turn on Windows Firewall radio button for one or both of the network locations.
• And Click OK.

12. Back Up Your Data

A data backup is a process of copying or archiving your important data files for the purpose of being able to restore data in case of data destruction. If a hacker can access and destroy your files then you can recover you data from backup storage. It acts as a secondary storage of data which is used for future data protection.

Tips

You can do your data back-up manually or automatically by archiving important documents to an external hard drive, or using Drop box or using Google drive or any others external devices etc.

13. Use Data encryption

Encryption is the process of encoding of your data using an encryption algorithm to transform information that only authorized users can access it and make it unreadable for unauthorized users.

It protects sensitive data such as credit card numbers, bank details, login credentials etc. by encoding and transforming data into unreadable cipher text.

Learn more about Data encryption

Finally, Laptop security is refer to the process of protecting the laptop from cyber attack and hackers. We have discussed on how to secure laptop from hackers and unauthorized access. Hope the article will be helpful for you!