Account security | Helpdesk - Digital Security for Journalists

Account security: How to protect your accounts

Social networks, email services, clouds or other tools: Journalists rely on many different services for their job – and these services may handle with a lot of information that journalists by definition have to protect. Their credentials for the accounts are then the most valuable thing journalists have to protect.

There are three basic measures that journalists have to take care of to relatively easy protect their accounts effectively:

Use strong passwords that differ for every account.

Enable Two-Factor-Authentication for every account.

Inform and train regularly how to detect phishing attacks.

Passwords and password management

It is tricky to choose a password. There are a lot of services that require a password, and computers will always be better to remember a long and complex password than humans.

Two-Factor Authentication

The Two-Factor Authentication means that you need a second credential in addition to your password. This is powerful, because even if an adversary gets your password, it cannot automatically log in.

Phishing

Adversaries try to get a user's credentials, such as log-in information. This can be done by asking for log-in information or by making a user click on a malicious site.

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