I listened to this podcast (Retirement Answer Man with Roger Whitney) where he had a Cybersecurity professional expert as a guest. He had some great thoughts about how to secure your data. Having worked in Information Security - I thought many of his thoughts were spot on. The podcast interview is here:

He breaks the recommendations in to three categories: 1 - Most important, 2 - Important, 3 - Good to do/Advanced techniques

I've listened to this podcast a couple of times and here are the highlights:

Level 1:

• Secure/ Lock down your email account. 
  • Use 2FA (2-Factor Authentication) esp for financial accounts
  • Use complex passwords. At least 12 characters using letters, capitals, numbers, symbols, characters, phrases. One way to do this is use a password manager like 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, etc.
• Don't respond to unsolicited texts and phone calls
  • With AI being used to smarten/contextualize phishing attacks - we can easily be fooled
  • Set up a family emergency code / password / phrase that only your family members know. (This is in case someone/AI tries to impersonate you on a phone call.)
• Monitor / Check your credit report at least quarterly.
• Use credit cards instead of debit cards. This is due to better security of the credit card infrastructure. And also - if there is fraud involved - the credit card companies act as a buffer and the money is taken from them. Whereas with debit cards - any money taken is directly taken from your bank account.

Level 2:

• Freeze your credit at all 3 credit agencies (Transunion, Experian, Equifax) : (It's easy to unfreeze credit temporarily for the infrequent times you need to - new credit card, car loan, etc.)
• Use alerts on bank accounts / credit card accounts
• Sign up for an identity pin with the IRS to prevent fraudulent tax returns being submitted in place of yours
• Claim your SSA.GOV account - even though it might be years before you apply for social security. 

Level 3:

• These are advanced level protections
• Locking your mobile phone simcard (so that your phone # can't be moved to a different physical phone)
• It's a best practice to do financial transactions on a different device than the one you do normal/daily usage (email, web, social media, etc.)
• Remove your personal information from Information Aggregators (i.e. TruePeopleSearch, MyLife, Spokeo)
• Use Passkeys instead of passwords (These are somewhat new. I need to research this more myself.)

I hope this information can be helpful. I'll be sharing this with family and church members to help them avoid problems. I've already done most of Level 1 & 2, but I'll be adding these tasks to my To-Do list.

Lastly - and additionally - here is some tips that a search on Google provided: