Summer is right around the corner, and the vacation fever automatically kicks in. Summer vacations or traveling abroad can be as exciting as Christmas morning, but did you know that in order to have the best vacation of your life, you have to be equally aware of how you plan your travels through online means.
Planning a trip abroad or out of town, goes far beyond than just booking a plane ticket, picking out your favorite outfits, booking a seat in a famous restaurant, packing your bags and jumping on a plane. It doesn’t only have to do with traveling by air, but any means of transportation. If you are planning to visit Schengen, we recommend you to gather more information about to Schengen visa application before you plan your trip.
For example, when you’re super excited to get on the plane and straight to the beach, you might accidentally forget a bag or two at the airport terminal. What if one of those bags contained your boarding pass or a super important document containing all your personal information. You may just assume that someone would safely return your belongings back to you, and even though that’s a little true, what do you do if your boarding pass gets into the wrong hands?
All your luck can change in a split-second of forgetfulness, so for that, you have to make sure you keep some key pointers in mind, before and while traveling abroad.
There’s so much to look into when planning a trip, mainly keeping track of all the problems that can arise on the way there. For that, I’m here to give you a really quick guide to having the best expedition of your life, while staying woke of all the cyber threats around you that you can easily avoid.
The key points to staying cyber safe when traveling
Traveling can be made pretty easy if you only take the time to educate yourself on the various ways to stay out of trouble. Most of us vacationers put a lot of time and effort making sure we’ve packed the right outfits according to the weather forecasts, or packing the right foods for traveling. But, what about packing your mind with the information to safe-guard all the devices and sensitive information you carry with you on your trip?
Most of us vacationers love taking loads of pictures, sharing them online, or take all our electronic gadgets like our phones, tabs and even laptops. But did you stop to double-check if you’ve packed up all the proper and updates software for your devices, securing it from cyber-attacks or hackers? Below you’ll find some of the key tips to the perfect vacation or travels:
Stranger danger- booking your trip
We can get pretty excited when looking at the pictures various travel agencies put up and settle for them, without thinking twice if they’re authentic or not. I understand that most of us sometimes would like to skip the benefit of the doubt and support unknown or small businesses. But, this isn’t an outfit that you’re about to invest your money into, it’s an entire travel ticket! So for the future, make sure you look for renowned or reliable travel sources and then make your bookings.
Spruce up your electronic devices
Believe it or not, just like you can catch a common cold while traveling, your phone can catch a common virus. So, before leaving, make sure you update your phone with the best anti-virus software, giving your phone the occasional spring cleaning it needs.
The backup plan
When traveling it’s always wise to backup all your files, pictures, videos and send them to the Cloud, Dropbox or a hard drive and delete whatever is necessary. Haven’t you learned anything from the amount of celebrity leaked photos?
Lock and key
The reason I said back up your data, you’ll never know when disaster can strike. Always password protect your phone and lock your device when it’s left unattended. Speaking of lock and key, for double the protection, make sure you enable multi-factor authentication for every profile on your device, be it your social media accounts, your banking apps or email.
Don’t use the public Wi-Fi
As tempting as free Wi-Fi sounds, never and I mean never connect to an unknown source. This can result in your data being wiped out, your device being hacked or your important files being held at ransom. To keep yourself safeguarded, there are many cheap cybersecurity services that you can look into, encrypting your digital footprints whenever you accidentally connect to an unknown internet source.
Swiper no swiping!
When traveling, while updating your devices with the best Anti-virus’, make sure you also download some payment apps such as Samsung Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Never use or swipe your Credit Cards on foreign soil. As paranoid as that sounds, it’s the safest way to shopping!
Device hygiene
Sounds funny right? But you know how our parents tell us to never share a straw or our makeup with a stranger, because you could catch something dangerous, well, the same applies to your devices. Never let anyone use your phone, you never know what they could be doing on it the moment you look away that could be very harmful. On the other hand, also don’t use any public devices to surf the net or log into your accounts. Most public devices are always under surveillance, waiting to steal your data.
Don’t do it for the Gram!
Going on vacation or traveling abroad should also be a spiritually healing process for you. Cut back from posting on social media, and especially don’t upload any pictures with definite landmarks, addresses or street names; especially if you leave your profile public. These key points are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to staying cyber safe. With the amount of ongoing cyber-attacks that have sky-rocketed in a short time span, why leave your front door open to more? So, always check these pointers off your to-do list among your other fun lists for traveling and I assure you, you’ll never be disappointed.
Author Bio:
Jade, is a writer and editor on Cyber-security She creates blog posts to help keep her audiences up-to-date and most importantly informed about the need to keep online privacy and security a top priority.
