Help secure your devices, your personal information, and your family against online threats with easy-to-use internet security tips.
Security tips
Social engineering
Social engineering is the use of deception and manipulation of human behavior to influence you into divulging confidential or personal information and using it for fraudulent purposes. Before you share sensitive details about yourself, you should vet the requestor’s credibility, and never give out passwords or other information that could be used to access your accounts or steal your identity.
Links and attachments
Be extra careful clicking on links and attachments in emails. Scammers often imitate real companies or individuals in email messages to entice people to share usernames, passwords, account information, or credit card numbers.
Even though the sending party might look legitimate, there is a possibility that they might not be. Be sure to examine the sender’s email address and verify that it is official.
Strong passwords
Use strong passwords for accounts and devices.
When creating a password, use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
- The longer your passwords are, the harder they are to crack.
- Never use the same password for multiple accounts.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Use MFA; it is considered a best practice to help further protect yourself against hacks and social engineering.
- MFA works by requiring you to log in with more than one set of credentials to authenticate your identity.
- Turn on MFA when a website or app offers it — especially for sensitive sites like social media, email or banking websites.
- Xfinity offers two-step verification to help protect online access to your account, Xfinity web pages and most apps.
- Find information about two-step verification for signing in and Xfinity app setup.
Social media settings
Be careful when sharing personal information.
Never share sensitive or confidential information on social media, such as your full birthdate, current address, or location.
Update apps and operating systems
Keep your devices’ operating systems and apps updated to the latest version to ensure the latest security patches are installed.
If your device offers automatic updates for apps, turn on this feature.
Secure your information
Secure your payment and personal information when shopping online.
- Submit payment information only on websites with a URL that begins with https://.
- The "s" stands for "secure," over the baseline http://.
- If you’re shopping on a mobile device, submit payment information only on trusted apps.
- Use caution when saving payment information in your web browser or mobile wallet and refrain from using automatic fill (auto-fill) features.