No matter how you look at it, digital communication is vital. It allows us to communicate with your friends and family across vast distances. Furthermore, digital communication also helps ensure an open and effective dialogue within companies and organizations.
Essentially, digital communication makes discussions and negotiations faster, enabling a seamless transfer of knowledge, while ensuring that every member of a team is working collaboratively towards a similar goal.
The Importance of Secure Digital Communication
In the past, communications between individuals relied on basic forms of communication such as talking face to face, sending letters in the mail, or by using long-distance telegrams.
However, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, communication, more specifically business communication, has grown substantially and along with it, so has the need to keep in continuous contact with suppliers, traders, business partners, staff members, and clients.
First, we started relying on postal services for communication. Then, technology evolved, and we started using telephones and other types of audio communications.
These were followed by the development of fax and email communications, which have led us into the age of digital communication.
While this has been highly beneficial in terms of being able to communicate faster and more efficiently, it has also opened to doors to the whole host of risks as well.
Today, hackers and cybercriminals are able to use the internet to steal digital information. Therefore, it’s now more important than ever to ensure safe and secure digital communication while using the internet.
In the end, secure digital communication isn’t just a tool or service. It’s a necessity, which protects entities from their own legal obligations, as well as illegal activities carried out by malicious actors.
Tips to Ensure Secure Digital Communication
While there are many risks associated with digital communication, there are also many ways that employers and individuals can mitigate these risks. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the best ways to ensure secure digital communication.
Use a Proxy Website or VPN
One of the most basic ways to keep your digital communication safe and anonymous is to pretend to be somebody else. Essentially, this is what using a proxy website or VPN does.
These services route your internet connection through a remote computer server, which disguises your computer’s IP address and makes it appear to be coming from the server’s location as opposed to your own. This ensures that your IP is completely untraceable during your online communications.
Read NordVPN review to learn more about what a VPN can do for you.
Encrypt Your Data
A slightly more complicated method for securing your digital communications ensures that your data is encrypted. This can be achieved by using services such as a VPN; however, you may also choose to encrypt your data by using the Tor browser to access the internet.
TOR, which is short for The Onion Router, is a network of safe, virtual tunnels, which encrypt user data and allow people to improve their online privacy and safety.
Essentially, browsing the internet with TOR is much like using dozens of proxy websites at the same, each one being completely randomized periodically.
Due to the sensitive information that they deal with, people such as civil activists and journalists should only ever communicate via encrypted channels such as TOR to protect their data, as well as their own personal safety.
WhatsApp in another safe messaging application, which claims to encrypt its users’ messages from end to end, making it impossible for their communications to be traced.
Learn more about encrypted messaging apps.
Always Use Strong, Unique Passwords
You’ve likely heard this a thousand times before, but it can’t be stressed enough that using the same password for all of your online accounts makes it easy for hackers and cybercriminals to gain access to them.
Therefore, it’s important to always create strong, unique passwords when registering for an online account. Also, remember to create a new password for every new account that you register.
Of course, it can be hard to remember every password for every website that you use. So, if you find yourself having trouble remembering all your credentials, you might want to consider using a password manager to help you keep track of everything.
Password managers are software applications which store your passwords in a safe, encrypted vault, which can only be accessed by using a master password that you create. Also, many of these programs will have features to help you create complex randomized passwords for the apps and websites that you use.
Use Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is one of the best ways to ensure that outside actors aren’t able to access your accounts or information.
Essentially, two-factor authentication adds a secondary authentication measure, which prevents people who aren’t you from being able to access your accounts.
The traditional method of using a single username and password is known as single-factor authentication. On the other hand, two-factor authentication requires users to have at least two out of three credentials to be able to gain access to an account.
In most cases, two-factor authentication will require something the user knows, such as a PIN or password, something the user has, such as a phone or email account, as well as something the user is, such as a fingerprint or facial scan.
