With the coronavirus spreading around the world and shops closing left right and centre, the digital world has never been more important.
People are more online, they are spending their money online, and they are connecting with their friends and family online. All of this makes for the perfect storm – a storm where digital identity theft is rampant.
You cannot protect your customers once they leave your site. But there are many methods and strategies to enhance digital identity to protect customers.
Ensuring that each account is attached to a real person is the first step, followed by using better authentication methods each time they log in. For ideas on how to accomplish these two tasks, follow this guide:
Contents
1) Know How Digital Identity is Exposed
Digital identity is exposed in a variety of ways. Information can be stolen off of public Wi-Fi networks, from unsecured websites, phishing spam, easy passwords, location sharing settings, adding strangers to your social media, and much more.
The damage is pervasive and can affect multiple areas of a person’s life. We all need to be more responsible, but for businesses, it is up to them to force their customers to take stronger precautions. So that even if there is a breach it does not impact any other aspect of their life.
2) Improve Verification Measures
This is done first by improving your verification method. You need to ensure that a customer only has one account and that customer is who they say they are.
This can be done in a few ways. Those that deal with sensitive data, like banks, will require ID verification and even address verification.
Most business, however, should request customers to use two-factor authentication and limit the number of accounts linked to one number.
3) Improve Authentication Measures
Authentication should occur every time a customer logs in. This can be done through a variety of measures like AI or machine learning. So your system knows where your customer usually accesses his or her account from. Two-factor authentication or biometric authentication is used.
4) Force Strong Passwords
Require complex, unique passwords for your customers. This way if you are hacked and their information is stolen, those passwords are useless everywhere else.
5) Delete Unnecessary Information
If the information isn’t essential, you should aim to delete it. In some cases, for instance, if the customer is from the EU, this might be the law.
6) Inform Customers of What They Can Do
As the biggest risk to their identity is your customer, you should also let them know what they can do to:
- To Protect their digital identity
- Protect their passwords
- Protect their internet access
7) Improve Your Business’ Security
Finally, work to improve your own business’ security other than the standard IT improvements. You should also train your employees on how to protect themselves and their identities from threats because sometimes they login to business accounts from home where hackers can gain access.
