How to Secure Your Paypal Account?

Your online finances must be adequately protected. In this post, you will learn how to protect your PayPal account.

With hundreds of millions of users throughout the world, PayPal has long been an international leader in the electronic payments enterprise. But as we know, money continues to attract scammers, especially now that our lives are almost entirely online. Here's what you need to do to be able to send or receive money securely through PayPal.

How Secure is Paypal?

PayPal is a fairly reliable platform that offers a high level of security and is constantly improving. The company has an official bug bounty program for white hat hackers to uncover vulnerabilities. PayPal has paid out nearly $ 4 million since 2018. The program also extends to various other services owned by PayPal, such as Venmo.

PayPal also handles its users' data responsibly: there was a reported leak in 2017, but this leak related to a company's infrastructure that PayPal acquired at the time. And all payments within PayPal are based on email addresses so that users never have to give their bank details to the providers.

Regardless of the technology, however, we cannot ignore the human factor. While PayPal does a lot to secure its users' transactions, users themselves sometimes make mistakes that cost them real money. To avoid such a fate, follow these simple rules.

Protect Your Paypal Account

Protection Against Hacking at PayPal

First, make sure that your PayPal account has a reliable password. Reliable means long, unambiguous, and difficult to guess. If you use a weak password or use the same password for many accounts, your PayPal account is unsafe to brute force attacks or credential stuffing. It's not difficult to design a good password (little digression: Here we explain how to create a secure password ), although managing multiple passwords can be cumbersome. However, you may find refuge in our [ password manager. It can do both: generate reliable passwords and keep them safe.

When it comes to finances, it pays to be on the safe side. Make sure you activate two-factor authentication. PayPal can as desired once code via text messages received or generated in an application. The app-based option is generally considered to be more reliable, but any 2FA is better than none at all. So if you strictly reject an authentication app, at least use the one-time codes sent by SMS.

Also, think twice about your secret security questions and answers. Your grandmother's maiden name or your first school can now be easily extracted via social media. Such security issues offer poor protection. Be smarter and use the name of your relatives or friends instead of the name of your old school, for example. Just don't forget what the correct answer is.

In addition to setting up authentication, make sure that notifications are set up to work properly for you. Using mobile push notifications to notify you of outgoing payments will probably be the most useful measure in terms of security. So if someone breaks into your account and starts spending your money, rest assured that you will know about it right away and put an end to it immediately.

A slightly less intuitive note, even if you do receive notifications, from time to time you should still do a manual review of your account and transaction history. If you find PayPal showing transactions that you haven't made, change your password, your security questions, and contact PayPal support immediately.

Don't skip to run antivirus scans on the devices that you use for PayPal, that is, your PC and your smartphone. When your money is at risk, no precaution is too bad.

Protection Against Cyber-attacks at PayPal

Always remember that public WiFi is unsafe. Never use it for financial transactions without making sure you have a secure connection. If you have to complete a transaction while using free WiFi in a café or at the airport, set up a secure VPN connection first and only then open your PayPal app.

Be careful with incoming emails that appear to be from PayPal. You could potentially be a phishing threat. PayPal has long been at the top of the list of companies most affected by phishing. But that's also obvious, because fraudsters hunt for money, remember? Use standard surveillance techniques to detect phishing: carefully review the sender's address and any related links in the message.

Better still, don't click any links at all. Instead, enter PayPal's address into your browser, log in, and check for notifications on your account. If you don't have one, the email is very likely fake.

And, most importantly, never enter your PayPal account details if you have the slightest doubt about the legitimacy of the email or website you are dealing with.

Some recommend using PayPal only through a separate browser or even a separate device used solely for this purpose.