How Apple Pay and PayPal can help shoppers avoid hacks
Culture
If recent hacks of Home Depot, Target and Apple iCloud accounts have you worried.
About online shopping, here are some tips for shopping safer.
First, avoid clicking on emailed links for deals that seem too good to be true.>>If a deal shows up in your email not only could it just be spam.
It may also be a phishing attempt.
So, if you go to it and you enter in your log in information.
You may be passing that off to an entity that is not who you think it is.
Instead of clicking a link, type in the URL of the website you want to visit.
When it's time to pay, use a virtual credit card number.
It masks your actual credit card number and is only valid for one purchase and a specific amount.
If the card number does get stolen by thieves, you don't have to worry.
About having additional charges run up on it because they can't charge anything to it.
And you don't have to worry about sending your actual credit card number across the internet.
For a $5 monthly fee, the service mask me allows you to generate virtual card numbers on the fly.
Apple Pay is another service that offers extra protection.
It makes the card data unreadable for criminals.
It's only gonna be the issuer who can read that card data.
It's also validating your identity.
PayPal also safeguards consumers.
They're going to notice, odd or suspicious transactions.
Probably far faster.
it may be even safer to shop and a store's app.
They're less frequently targeted by hackers.
We haven't seen that same kind of malware yet on the mobile device.
Preventing hacking is one way to make the holidays happier.
In San Francisco, I'm Sumi Das, CNET.com for CBS News
