Safe Surfing

With all the traffic on the Internet nowadays it's important to remember that it's not all smooth sailing when surfing the net. With new and sneaky ways being developed by hackers to get their hands on your money, it's important to be aware of how they can get at you.

Identity Theft

Sometimes it's not even your money they're after; at least not directly. Most people nowadays underestimate the value of your personal information and how it can be used against you. The best example of this is when Jeremy Clarkson was served up a big spoonful of humble pie by a would-be hacker.

Phishing
Most of time it's not as easy as that to obtain your details and these guys have to come up with inventive ways to get their on your info. This is done by "phising", whereby you'll receive fraudulent emails from, for example, what appears to be your bank requesting 3 numbers of your PIN code or something similar. Once you do, it'll fail to register and ask you to re-submit the numbers. This continues until the hacker has the full PIN code and therefore access to your account. It's not only bank web pages that can be duplicated so be wary. In this short video, we see how easy it is to create a fake PayPal phising site:



Viruses
Viruses can be stored in downloads and released upon opening the file so only download from reliable websites and make sure you have good anti-virus software installed. Viruses can do anything from creating a backdoor to your computer which bypasses password protection to deleting everything on your hard drive. Here's a video about how virues work:



That's all for now. Hope this helps you protect yourself a bit better