Protecting Yourself Online, Part 2

Since the credit union has implemented Multi-Factor Authentication I thought I would take the opportunity to remind us all of some basic online security practices.

As stated in our previous post “Protecting Yourself Online“, MFA will make it more difficult for online thieves to create a Piedmont CU look-alike website designed to steal user names and passwords. Here are just a few more tips for protecting yourself online:

  1. Before entering your password or personal information on any secure site look for the padlock graphic either in the address bar or in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser window. Note: PCU NetBranch addresses always start with “https://nbp1.cunetbranch.com/piedmont”.
  2. Do not click on a weblink that is inside of an email claiming to be from your credit union, bank, financial firm, or anyone that you give personal information to. Instead type the address in by hand.
  3. For sites that you visit regularly like NetBranch, piedmontcu.org, or even PCU Member Connect, make a bookmark to the site and always use the bookmark to get back to it. PCU Member Connect has a nice live feed feature that can be bookmarked by clicking the little orange icon in the address bar.
  4. Update your web browser. The most modern web browsers such as Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 have anti-phishing capabilities built-in. Use them.
  5. Use MFA to your advantage. Unless you are using a foreign computer it should not ask you to answer any security questions. So if you are using a computer you always use to access NetBranch and it all of a sudden it prompts you to answer a security question, please take note and verify the address and the pad-lock icon that we talked about in step 1.

If you are ever in doubt about any Piedmont Credit Union site just give us a call, email, or even a comment on this site. Sometimes this site even gets checked on the weekends! So far no one has had any problems with MFA that we know about. Please contact our office directly if you have experienced any problem with it. Thank you for using NetBranch and thank you for being part of Piedmont Credit Union.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under fraud & identity theft, multi-factor authentication(MFA), phishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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