Keeping Your Online Bank Account Safe

Your personal online banking account Malaysia has just been created, so with your device in your hand, you can access your bank account and funds anytime, anywhere. No need to walk all the way to the shop lots just to reach the ATM unless you need the physical notes.

The advantages are fun to enjoy until one day, your account is unexpectedly beached and you lose much of your funds through unauthorized transactions, which by then, would already be flooding your phone’s inboxes. What went wrong? Was your password easy to figure out? How many layers of protection did you apply?

Keeping your online bank account secured is the surefire way to not lose your money from theft. Just having a password isn’t enough.

A Longer, Ever Changing Password

Your password must be complex, meaning that it has to be long in a way that you mix words with symbols or numbers and it must never be a phrase, slogan or so from the media or commonly used in society, like happy birthday. If you still want to do so anyway, at least it must be something that you or a few of your friends know or the reference is obscure.

Never use the same password as the ones in your social media, gaming accounts, and so on. Never record your passwords on your debit or credit cards, in your wallet, or if you are writing it on paper, anywhere that people can see or access. Your phone’s notes app may not always be reliable, as people could see snoop in from behind and see what you are looking at.

Change your passwords regularly. In a month or a few, switch to a new password. Never use automatic logins at all. The browser saves your username and password, and while convenient, it isn’t safe to login this way. If someone uses your phone or laptop, they could access your bank account right away.

No Public WiFi

Accessing your bank account using a public WiFi is asking to be exposed in a no man’s land where getting shot is a 90% guarantee. Hackers can drop in and “eavesdrop” what you are up to in your online bank account. Additionally, public WiFis can also be vulnerable to malicious hotspots, malwares and spywares. 

If you have to anyway, at the very least disable public file sharing, which you can look up on how to do so in your operating system. Make sure that the site’s link has “https”, the letter “s” being an indicator of the site’s safe status. If you want to be safer, simply use a VPN or cellular network to surf the internet with the public WiFi.

Two Factor Authentication

A two factor authentication, or 2FA, may require you to take an extra step to log into your bank account, but it still increases its security as you are only given one unique code every time you log in. 

Furthermore, if someone tries to beach your account and you suddenly receive a text telling you to enter this a code, you know that your account is compromised and you have enough time to report to your bank regarding the attempted breach.