How to be safe online

Preface
A lot of my friends keep asking me about how to be safe online. Recently i heard that one of my friends bank account was hacked and a money transfer was made which was not initiated by him. The bank agreed to refund the fradulent money transfer, but it had put him under risk and he was under fear of losing all the money he had on his account. I noticed another of my friends facebook account was hacked and a lot of unwanted applications were reading his profile.

I agreed to jot down some tips and tricks of how to be safe online. ( FinePrint : This is not 100% fool proof, but it is intended to help you to be safer than before )

How to be safe online
In today's social IT framework it is very difficult to keep yourself ( your ID ) and
your online transactions safe. If you follow the tips below, it will help you to be a safer
Netizen online.

a) Doubt everything. A popular mechanism used by the fraudsters is a technique called
Phishing. If you receive an email from a bank, asking to visit their website and login
to confirm some details, there is probably a catch. Well, it may not be the bank at all who sent you that email. When you click on the link in the email, it takes you to a site that looks like the bank website, whereas it may not be so. Do not trust a link sent in the email on its face value. Check for the lock sign and the certificates of the site. Better still, you go to the bank website directly.

b) Cookies : Keep clearing your cookies and internet history and automatic password storage. They help tracking between sites. Some sites orchestrate between themselves to share the cookies left in your system for their marketing benefits. Which is what is useful to the fraudsters.

c) Spywares : Most often, it is those spywares that get to your PC / Laptop which is responsible for watching your online activities and reporting to a fraud organisation. Use an appropriate spyware. I would recommend, McAfee, Symantec, Comodo or Lavasoft tools.

d) Firewall : Use a proper software firewall and prevent all incoming accesses beyond the firewall into your network. This way the fraudsters will not be able to take control of your PC / Laptop.

e) Anti-Virus : Use a proper anti virus software, which can save you from trojan viruses, which opens your PC / Laptop to outsiders.

e) Public : Avoid using online banking from public PC's , internet centers, and hotel systems. Avoid using public unsecure WiFi, and incase if you are in urgency and must get into hotel/airport WiFi networks, use the web through a secure VPN and proxy of your company. Remember all unsecure WiFi communications are traceable by a fraud user who can share the same connection with you on the same unsecure WiFi.

f) Encrypt Hard disk : If possible encrypt your hard disk using hard disk encryption software. This saves you from your data getting literally hijacked from your hard disk, if you happen to loose your laptop.

g) Portable disks : Do not keep confidential data on portable disks. Simply for the reason that, if you loose your disk, you loose your confidential data. If you must, then use an encryption software on it.

h) Change passwords : Change your online passwords once in 30 days. Do not maintain all passwords in a single keystore file. You can use a clue list in the keystore which can help you recollect, but do not store the password itself.

i) Social websites : Facebook / Orkut / Myspace / LinkedIn - Take extra care when you use the socialisation sites. Do not give all your personal data in them. And in facebook stop using all those unwanted applications which says they need access to your profile.

j) Torrents / Download sites : Be sure of what you are downloading does not download that extra bit, which you do not want to get into your PC. Nothing is free in this materialistic world.

k) Too good to be true offers : If an offer sounds too good to be true, probably it is. Recently one of the youngsters received an email stating that this company saw his cv on a popular job site and is in touch with him to recruit him with a pay of £1500 a month. And all this is to work from home for just 6 hrs a day.. Sounded too good to be true. Upon verification, the from address was from a personal mail id and not a company id. When googled about this mail subject, there were popular discussions about money laundering work offered in guise of a payment processing officer work.

Hope this helps...

1,719,574,100

1,719,574,100 - That is the number of concurrent users, using the internet when i was checking it.

Take a look at this linkhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8552415.stm

Click start and stop when you want, you will see the number of users using the internet

at that point of time..

Go tohttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8552410.stm

That will show you the growth of internet user from the year 1998.

Its truly amazing.. Wow...

I loved it..