Early in my crypto experiments, I stumbled upon this very convincing pop-up ad. A clickbait masquerading as a legit investment platform on FOREX and cryptocurrency trading. Indeed it was registered in Cyprus. But it is not all about being registered. It is the reputation that counts. And the lack of legitimate international regulation was a major takeaway. In short, I was almost scammed by this company called EverFX. It was good that I was simultaneously checking information about it while talking to the female agent, and reading pleas for help among unfortunate individuals whose life savings have dissipated. I had to politely cut our conversation despite her insistence to make an initial deposit. Persistent international calls ensued and lasted for three weeks, which I effectively ignored. I decided immediately to find ways to secure my accounts through various strategies.
Some Personal Security Strategies
How did I harden security in my accounts? The first thing I did after that incident was to replace my default DNS (domain name system) with one of the better and more secure public DNS servers. There are good ones to choose from like Cloudflare or Quad9. VPN servers are a bit better if you wish to shell out some funds for their service.
My next agenda was to find a secure browser. Google’s tracking and activity recording scares me of my privacy and did not fit my requirements. Watching YouTube videos makes it much worse with a ton of ads. I tried several adblockers which were eventually rendered useless by certain algorithms within Google.
I went on to the Brave browser, one of the most secure browsers around for my second security measure. It also rewards its users' BAT (Basic Attention Token) should anyone wishes to earn from advertisers. These are not forced into users as Brave has its built-in adblocker.
For my final layer of protection, I activated 2FA in all my accounts. I chose the Twilio Authy authenticator desktop edition over the Google authenticator for better security. It works differently from the OTP (one-time PIN) sent by your accounts because it resets every 30 seconds to generate a new set of PIN.
As previously mentioned, I stopped using my smartphone for my online crypto transactions to further minimize data breaches. But anyone may do so upon properly implementing security protocols in his/her phone. https://www.publish0x.com?a=ELe329NAd6
