How can I secure my online activity while traveling?
We're going to travel across Asia for 16-18 months. During that time, we'll need to conduct online banking activities such as checking account balances, paying credit cards, and filing our taxes. In addition to financial activities, of course we want to avoid making our email and social media accounts vulnerable.
What is the best way to make sure our online activities are secure, or as secure as possible?
We'll be carrying our own laptop and tablet. As I see it, the available ways to connect to the internet, and their relative security risks, are:
- Shared computers at internet cafes and hotels (risky, and shouldn't be necessary as long as we are in a location with wi-fi access)
- Wi-fi networks at guesthouses hotels (possibly risky)
- Carry our own wireless hotspot (safer but added bulk to carry around and it's another thing that needs to be charged)
Are there other options missing from the above list? And, what other precautions should we consider to minimize the risk of our online accounts getting hacked?
Best Answer
Whenever you use a shared computer, be it internet café or hotel/hostel, make sure you open a private navigation session. This ensures that no cache, cookies, form data, and passwords are stored once the session is closed. To be extra safe you should also manually clear this data from the settings panel of your browser once you're done. This is a very basic yet extremely important measure you should airways take to safeguard your accounts.
Other, possibly more effective, measures include connecting to a safe VPN, and using that to tunnel you through towards the critical sites you need to navigate (bank accounts, emails, PayPal, etc). If you want to go the extra mile you can search for Tor browsing.
All of the advices above assume you don't have restricted user rights on the machines you use.
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