5 Tips for Staying Safe Online From a Google Security Expert (Video)

Stop using the same password everywhere, for one.

We’re living in the age of the data breach. From Target to Home Depot, a growing number of companies have been targeted by hackers hoping to score customers’ personal data and credit card numbers.

Unfortunately for consumers, there’s little we can do to be sure the companies we’re shopping at are doing enough to prevent these kinds of incidents. However, we can take precautions to secure ourselves in case our personal information is ever stolen.

What should we do to stay safe from identity theft and fraud? Mark Risher, Google’s spam and abuse chief, offers these tips:

Keep your software updated

Updating software, whether it be on your phone, laptop, or television, is extremely important. When hackers discover new ways to steal your data, gadget and software companies usually work quickly to release fixes for those vulnerabilities. But it’s up to us to actually install those updates — or set it so that updates occur automatically.

“We’ve done some research and it’s something security experts themselves are very good at, but the general public is not,” says Risher