Keep Your Home Safe For Christmas
This festive holiday season is the busiest time of the year for elves and reindeers, but also for thieves. Some recent surveys revealed that on New Year's Day alone, theft claims increase by 8% A recent Aviva survey revealed that on New Year’s Eve household theft claims increase by 8%. Believe it and with electronics and new digital and computer based applications being the most stolen items; iPhones, laptops and notebook tablets/iPads are really at the top of thieves’ wish lists. Texas Safe & Lock wants to remind everyone to do all you can to prevent theft. Practical things you may not have considered are simple, and can make a big difference this year.
Texas Safe & Lock has spoken to many experts in security and asked them for their top tips to help you keep your home and valuables safe this holiday. We want to share what we learned.
Do Make your home, business, or cabin less attractive to thieves. ‘Consider using external dusk till dawn lights and other visual deterrents including alarms and CCTV cameras (as burglars don’t want to be seen),’ says Steffan George, Director of Business Development at the Master Locksmiths Association ’If you are staying away from your property, make it look like the house is still occupied with lights on timers and a fake TV upstairs. These can act as good deterrents. We highly recommend adding professionally installed high quality locks to doors and windows and consider securing your outbuildings with tools safely stored away.’ By spending a little on a lock that is old and easily picked, you can deter unwanted theives who won't take to time to try to gain access.
Be sure to protect your valuables. Never never never, leave any thing of value in plain sight. Especially from open windows if curtains or blinds stay open. You need to not advertise those gifts you may have received. Consider a safe, professionaly specified and installed by us of course. What better way to hide from site, a safe that only you remember where it is. Lock all doors, windows, gates, pool areas, garages, and keep them locked, even when you are home. Keys should be kept at all times out of sight in a safe place and out of a letter box in the door at the entry for sure.
Remove new presents from under the tree to a safe location not visible from doors or windows. Most police recommend not leaving a welcoming invitation to any burgler. All gift wrapping papers, bows, ribbons, and trash from entertaining a thief who may check out your garbage can to see what's new they can lift easily.
Refrain from pictures, postings, tweets, and the like from all social media about new gifts you or your family received. Most importantly if you will be leaving for the entire Holiday Season...make it look like you are still there. Leave lights on timers, maybe even make sure no one except those who will take in your mail or watch a pet know you will even be gone.
Fraud and Internet thieves are certainly rampant right now. Phones, laptops, computers, garage remotes, thermostats and etc. can be hacked. Change passwords to extreme type with plenty of numbers, and of great length to annoy any would be attackers. Hackers, malware and theives are out there. Do all you can to learn about how to protect all your data in whatever capacity you can.
A special word from Andrei Petrus, Product Manager of Avira Antivirus Security for Android, shared his expertise. He says that an essential all-round security safety net for mobile devices looks like this:
‘An antivirus protection to stay ashore and safe from the plethora of threats that exist on the mobile realm: malware that might spy on you, steal personal information, send SMS to premium numbers, render your phone unusable.’ You will also need ‘a web protection to make sure you don't fall prey to phishing attacks or dodgy practices that cyber crooks adopt in order to steal information you'd usually exchange only with trusted websites, such as banks.’ And finally ’the possibility to lock certain apps behind an additional layer of protection. You might hand your phone to friends and colleagues sometimes when they want to make a call, but make sure that your messages / photos / browser history are inaccessible to them.’
A special note about how to keep your personal information safe. A phone theft means first access the web dashboard from your security solution provider, push a recovery alert on the device and try to identify its location on a map. Could be that you forgot it somewhere and whomever found it will read the message and call you back to return it. If that is not the case, but you see it moving on the map, proceed with a Remote Wipe command. It's important that your private information is immediately erased from a phone that's not your property anymore. Once you’re certain you have been the victim of a theft, report the incident at the police station.
Of great importance is to make sure you use the Remote Wipe option so that the thief doesn’t get access to the private information stored on your phone. While recovering the device might become a duty of the police, you have to make sure you protect your personal data even when your phone is no longer in your possession.
These are just few of the ways you can protect yourself from fraud and theft this season. For more than 30 years David Blizzard, owner of Texas Safe & Lock, and his team of certified technicians, have continued to serve you as clients in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with integrity, quality and affordability. Texas Safe & Lock is one of the most progressive, reputable and professional locksmith companies in the Dallas/Forth Worth area. Take it from a professional; you can take charge of these types of unwanted situations and make it as difficult as you can for an unwanted thief to have access to you, your home, your family and loved ones, in your home, business, or commercial facility. We take great care in providing the best safes, locks, and products in the industry you need to meet those goals.
Texas Safe & Lock provides residential, commercial, automotive locksmith services, safe and vault sales and service, and 24-hour emergency lock-out service, for the entire DFW Metroplex. Call 469-467-7233 24/7 for immediate service!
Avira Antivirus Security has been a journey marked by strong growth in a volatile industry. Driven by the vision of providing online freedom, Avira offers powerful security for multiple devices. As a pioneer of the Freemium business model, we have grown into a 500-strong multinational company that protects the digital lives of millions of users worldwide.