BY MONITORING YOUR INTERNET browsing activity, identity thieves can steal personal information and use it to hack into your financial accounts. And ID theft has spiked during the pandemic. The number of cases more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, to nearly 1.4 million, according to a recent report by the Federal Trade Commission.
One way to protect yourself is by using a virtual private network. With a VPN, your connection is encrypted, which means anyone trying to monitor it will see nothing more than an unintelligible sequence of letters and numbers. A VPN also hides your IP address from the websites you visit. An IP address is a unique online identifier, and it can help hackers stitch together information about you.
This story is from the May 2021 edition of Kiplinger's Personal Finance.
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This story is from the May 2021 edition of Kiplinger's Personal Finance.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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