7 safety tips from hackers

Follow this advice from actual hackers, and you'll be a lot safer online.

1. Turn off your phone's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.Hackers are religious about this. Keeping these features "on" all the time makes it easy for strangers to slip into your phone.

The problem? If you keep Wi-Fi and Bluetooth active, hackers can see what networks you've connected to before, spoof them and trick your phone into connecting to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices that hackers carry around.

Once connected to your phone, hackers can bombard your device with malware, steal data or spy on you. And you won't even notice.

So, turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you need them. Turn them off when you don't.

2. Use two-step authentication. Nowadays, a single password isn't enough. They get exposed all the time.

Lots of email and social media services offer an extra later of protection: two-step authentication -- essentially a second, temporary password.

For example, when you set this up with Google, (GOOG) Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) andLinkedIn, (LNKD, Tech30) they ask you for a secret code every time you log in from a new device. You immediately get a text message with a six-digit number.

It's an effective way to keep out hackers. Even if someone gets your password, they'd still need your phone too -- an unlikely scenario.

3. Create a smart password strategy. For the select few websites with your most sensitive information (email, bank), create some long and unique passphrases, like+hisPl@tinumDr@gonBreathesF1re.

For everything else? Use a password manager. This type of program stores all your passwords online, so you can make each one different, and you won't have to remember them all.

But only use a password manager that encrypts them on your device. LastPass andPassword Safe do this.

(Why not use a password manager for everything? One master password unlocks them all. You create a single point of failure.)

Change all of your passwords more than once a year.