Change Your IP Address

Posts Tagged ‘surf safe’

Who you are has become a precious commodity to identity thieves. For this reason, many people now shred credit card statements, order items by cheque again, and pay with cash instead of debit card.

However, they often forget that the same hackers who stole personal information from corporate and government databases do not have to go so far to gather all the information of your personal identity online.

Why is it important to protect your identity online?

1. If someone has your account information, researching your personal information can result in finding the answers to your personal questions. Finding your birth certificate can result in knowing the mother’s maiden name, or it could be as simple as asking that information of you at a genealogy chat room. Reading about your favorite sports teams could lead them to your most likely password. Reading your blog could lead them to know where you consider home to be, another common security question. Thus a little online sleuthing can yield the answers to the security questions that were meant to protect your accounts, and it is information we have often already made available if you do not take steps to protect your identity online.
    
2. Your online identity can provide the information necessary to perform identity theft in the real, financial world. Without your current account information but armed with your real information, they may learn enough from your online identity enough to pretend to be you in the real world. Your name, address, and phone number are easily looked up. A social networking site can provide your employer and perhaps even income verification. Information on where you shop, your opinions of credit cards, your online portfolio analysis – all of this information attached to your online identity can give a would-be thief enough information to fill out the necessary forms to get a solid Gold credit card with your name on it.
    
3. If you do not protect your identity online, it is easy for someone to gather all of your personal information and then pretend to be you. A former business partner who wants to discredit you through professional forums, an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend who wants to destroy your life online, all of the information to do can be gleaned unless you have already protected your personal identity online.
    
4. Spear phishing is targeted phishing with the goal of either hacking someone’s computer or eliciting information out of them. This may be done by foreign corporations wanting technical information from a rival firm. It may be done by foreign nationals targeting those with security clearance in the United States. If you have not protected your identity online, you have given these predators the ability to approach you wrapped in a protective cloak. Potentially worse is that you have an insecure online identity, and the phishing attacks of these entities can be done from your online identity, leading law enforcement and searchers to your doorstep
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5. Many companies now do social networking searches of potential employees. If your online identity is either less than perfect or easily made falsely slanderous, you will lose out on employment and consulting opportunities.

Thankfully there are ways to protect your identity online, and the use of anonymous browsing software is the first step we all should take.

Web Security is all about educating yourself about online hazards. Education is the answer to computer security and protecting youngsters on the web. All parents need to educate themselves about Internet security, cyberbullying, and social networking dangers. These all represent threats which did not exist just a few years ago, certainly your old Dr Spock books are going to be no use here!

Social networking is growing at an amazing rate, with children of all ages and online predators and cyberbullies using these sites more and more. Parents should understand the guidelines for protecting children each site has, and if you do not believe the rules are strong enough don’t let your child join the site. There are some basic ground rules for social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, etc for kid safety.

• First, don’t let your child to use their real name, make a new nickname just for the online world.
• Second , make sure your child understands not to post your home address, home telephone number, or cell phone number.
• Third, make a time-frame for when you child can be online .
• Fourth, all photographs should be reviewed before being posted online .

You should understand that everything your child does on the internet is recorded there forever, once something is uploaded there is generally no delete button. As soon as a site is indexed by a search engine copies are made, so even if you delete the original you will still find thousands of copies all around the net.

Parents should know the way to work the social networking sites which includes making comments on pages, the wall, email, and posting photographs. If possible you should create an account on the social networking site to join in with your children. You can insist to your child that they will not have an account unless they make you a friend so that you can observe their wall, evaluate their friend list and assess the photos getting posted on the web. This simple act will help you forestall online predators from contacting your youngster. I understand most chiildren are not going to like this, but being upfront about everything is far better than being sneaky and being found out.

Cyberbullies bring into play a selection of technology to make threats, trouble, or make the Internet uncomfortable for children. Victims are often kids and the cyberbully generally goes to the same school as your child . Cyberbullies send e-mails, IM or messages to the victim’s cell or computer. This is starting to become even more popular on social networking sites. Parents need to chat to their kids to see if this is happening to them.

Web safety for children is all about parents being educated about web security. Parents need to take a pro-active role in educating themselves about how social networking site work and what is cyberbullying. The more you educate yourself about the internet and talk to your kids the safer they are going to be.

The online world is one of two faces, the side where we find what we need, book holidays, save time with online services and generally enjoy ourselves. Then there is the darker side, where individuals and organisations are trying to infiltrate our lives without permission, steal our identities, money and generally destroy everything we worked hard for! So yes while we can say the Internet has given us many things, we must not discount the threats it has produced.

Being safe online these days is much harder than even 12 months ago, the methods deployed by criminals become more taxing and skilful by the day. The speed at which these new hacking techniques are being deployed far outstrips the speed at which patches are released for the software we are all using. Even the most respected browsers from Microsoft and Firefox fall foul to many a threat, despite their respective parent companies spending millions of dollars on development. It is therefore even more vital these days to be proactive in your attempts to thwart online criminals, relying on your free antivirus software alone is only going to lead to disaster these days!

Perhaps the most common, and most dangerous, system infiltrations involve key loggers and hidden P2P applications. A system compromised in this way will be working as a server, distributing pirate software or pornography to other users around the world. This takes place without your knowledge, and often with your anti-virus software still running! This is because the program has altered the way your Virus package works, so it reports it is working but really it is not. At the same time key loggers on your computer will record every thing you type, every login, every email, all your bank details will be recorded and sent back to the criminals.

Always ensure you are running with a software firewall on your computer, and preferably a hardware firewall on your modem or router too. These of course must both be setup correctly, if they are configured to allow all traffic then they are effectively not there!

Further you should ensure you are running a complete Anti-Malware package, this will cover virus, phishing, adware, key-loggers and Trojans at the same time, the better packages will include full firewall capabilities in the same package. Ensure you computer is fully patched, which these days requires you to be running with licensed software. Never use pirate copies of operating systems or Anti-Virus products, it may sound like obvious advice but it is amazing how many people trust their online security to the very people who do most of the hacking in the first place!

Finally install IP changing software with encryption technology so as to hide yourself online, as if they can’t find you they can’t attack you!

There is a general argument currently being broadcast that Anti-Virus software has ‘had its day’ because the pace of virus releases is outstripping the capabilities of Anti-Virus software Vendors to issue updates to counteract them.  It is getting to the point when you would need to update your Virus database minute by minute! (a recent study by Panda Security, based in Bilbao, Spain, detects an average of 37,000 new viruses, worms, Trojans and other security threats per day!)

Look, if you said to me that folk should stop wasting their money on stand-alone anti-virus applications then I may agree with you to some point. The one thing that is outmoded is the term ‘anti-virus’.

Precisely speaking, the main online threat isn’t called a virus, a more suitable term should be ‘malware’ and it is time we started to conform to this new term.

Online threats consist of viruses, adware, key-loggers and trojans, all residing under the common term of spyware.

I understand the term ‘anti-virus’ is a heavily marketed term and when you mention the term ‘anti-virus’ to PC illiterate and green users they know precisely what you are talking about, but when you talk about ‘malware’ they often give you that glassy stare, you know, the kind of stare that screams ‘What the hell are you speaking about?!’.

Most anti-virus applications now offer protection against malware and other spyware related threats as well, so it is really daft to keep calling them anti-virus applications, they are essentially anti-malware applications.,

The older definition based anti virus protection is pretty much over as the latest anti-malware solutions are moving towards behavior based detection, however it would be suicidal to scrap anti-virus solutions just because of the fast evolution of new threats.

Scrapping your anti-virus solution would be reckless and plain dumb, just like exclaiming we should stop patching the security issues in software and leave them un-patched because the threats exploiting these failings are developing way too fast.

Should we stop installing security systems in our homes because new, more advanced burglars are born each day? If you can protect your system against known threats why not do it?

It’s correct, spyware develops much faster than the anti-malware solutions, but known malicious software gets recycled on the internet time after time. Protecting yourself against a known variant means you cannot be attacked by it again and trust me it is not uncommon to be attacked by the same variant frequently. This means antivirus software still plays an urgent role in your defense against malicious software, it also implies that anti virus program engineers are still detecting new threats at a particularly high rate.

New variants may infect a lot of PCs before they get noted, but once the anti-virus sellers release an up to date signature file to all their users, they are at least constraining the dissemination of the spyware and forestalling uninfected users from getting infected.

Scrapping anti-virus solutions means systems are left insecure, and if infected they could, for instance, be making a contribution to the processing power of bot networks like ‘hurricane’ (a gaming network bot), without your knowledge or consent, if nothing else this could use up your available bandwidth and slow down your computer.

At least an infected system can be cleaned once a new variant has been detected, thus you are pro-actively taking a bot network down bit by bit and making it tougher for the malware to spread any further. Remember, an infected machine becomes a distributor for new variants of the malware. Murdering a known variant means you are forestalling it from mutating and spreading.

It is true, the debate that the value of anti-virus software is declining is hogwash.  Improve it, don’t just scrap it, giant companies should stop putting reckless ideas into the minds of ordinary users, they should stop the throw-away-your-anti-virus-program-and-buy-our-software kind of selling. The internet is dangerous enough as it is, so don’t go encouraging folk to throw away their anti-malware applications, not even in today’s arena of sophisticated malware attacks. Anti-malware applications are frequently the sole line of defence that is’s available to beginner net users.

Right now the best thing you can do is be sure to run industry leading Anti Virus Anti-Malware Software, preferably with full firewall capability, and encrypt your online activities through a respected anonymous proxy server.