One of the most private things that you will do on the internet is to send emails to someone. When we sign up for an email service, we expect them to give us a security standard that is higher than anything else we do on the internet besides banking. Our email accounts are filled with both personal and business secrets that we would like to keep to ourselves. So if anyone was able to get into our emails, it could possibly be a devastating experience for both us and whoever we were sending the email to. But breaking into your account is not the only way that someone would be able to read your private emails. They could also see them as you send them through the network. Lucky for us there are ways that we can stop this from happening. There are several ways that you can encrypt your email messages to keep them quiet as they go through the air. We will discuss these methods and how you can use them when you send your own emails, especially over a wireless network. 
 
Most people who have used the internet, have kind of an ideal of what encryption means. You get an example of it every time that you go to a web site and see that little lock in your browser. When you see that lock, you know that there is a good chance that no one will be able to see your message as you see it. The lock helps you feel safe when you are making a transaction on your bank account.  The act of encryption allows your data to move back and forth, in what seems to the naked eye, as a bunch of scrambled data. It is then translated by software that has the encryption key into readable text. Now the person on the other end can understand what was sent to them. This type of security is exactly what you need when you send an email message out. 
 
There are several programs out there that will encrypt your email messages for you. One of the pieces of software that will do it is called GnuPG. It is free, open sourced software and it is very powerful. It gives you a public and private key that is used to be able to encrypt and decrypt a message. The person who has the private key is able to decrypt the message so that they can read it. If you do not have the private key, even if you are the one who originally sent the email, then you cannot see the message that was sent. There is also a setting that will encrypt messages using Microsoft Outlook. If you are in a hurry, this is a more than reasonable tool to use. 
 
Your email is a private thing; make sure that you keep it that way by using encryption on your messages. 

Searching the web through Google, you will come across an amazing assortment of treasures that you would have never thought that you would be interested in. Because of the link hierarchy of the internet, you can search Google for one thing and find yourself amazed at a whole different section of the internet. That is a great thing about the internet, the ability to find something of interest that you did not even think you would care about. But this same link hierarchy can also lead you down some dark paths on the internet as well. These are paths where you have to be careful when they ask you to click on links or download items. You want to be careful where you perform these types of activity at. If you pick the wrong web site to download an item from, you can be in trouble when it is time to install it. You can go from a nice working computer, to a machine that you will have to spend the next few days getting malware off of. In this article we will how you what to do if you find yourself on a certain type of site. If you find yourself on one of the types of web sites that we list, you want to make sure that you do not trust it and that you do not download anything from it. 
 
The first type of site that you want to be aware of if you find yourself accidently on it, is a warez site. A warez site is a web site that has cracked or pirated software, movies, music and anything else that you can think of. These web sites are notorious for people trying to find a way to stick something on your computer, which you do not want. So if you find that you are on a web site like this, make sure that you are not tempted to download anything from it. These web sites cannot be trusted and will lead you to nothing but trouble. 
 
Another type of web site that you want to make sure you do not download anything from when you are there, is any site that is asking for your personal information. If you find yourself on a web site that you didn’t mean to be on and it is asking for more than your email, then make sure that you do not download anything from there. More than likely it is a phising site that has somehow tricked you into going there. These sites will try to use multiple methods to get personal information from you. If they are not able to get it from the web site, then they will try to trick you into downloading something onto your computer. If you install it, then they will be able to put on there any piece of malware that they desire. This can lead to a huge loss of privacy for you and your family. 
 
The last type of site that you do not want to download anything from is adult sites. We hate to generalize the whole industry that runs adult sites but there are too many out there that are sketchy in nature. Hundreds of people a month report that there is some sort of malware that is present on an adult site that they visit regularly. If it is not put there by the owner of the site, then it is put there by one of the members of the site. Either way it can be dangerous for your computer. 
 
These are the three types of sites that you want to avoid downloading anything from if possible. If you do, then you can find yourself in a world of hurt.

You just got home from work. So now you just want to sit down and relax, while you spend some time on your computer. You decide that you want to see what all of your friends are up to on Facebook. So you log in and you see the normal chatter that goes on every other time that you log in. You look up and see a piece of red on the screen. This indicates that someone has sent you a message. You then click on the message and you see a weird link. You know the person that sent it to you and you consider them trustworthy. They state in the message that they really want you to see what is on the other side of that link. So you click it and nothing happens. You are just directed to a blank page, with nothing displayed on it. You start to surf Facebook again and then you decide to log out. The next day you receive an email from a couple of friends asking why you sent them a weird link that took them to nowhere. Now you know that the link was not as innocent as it seemed. It infected your Facebook account, and sent your friends that same infection. There are a couple of viruses out there, that attack social media web sites specifically. We will go through a few of them and tell you what you should look out for.

Social media security – common attacks

One of the most effective attacks on a social network was the Koobface virus. It had its reign of terror a couple of years ago. This was a virus, or more accurately a worm, named Koobface that attacked the users of Facebook. Since nothing like it had been seen before, people were caught unprepared. It was so effective, that the same formula was used to attack other social media web sites as well. This included Myspace, Bebo, Friendster and others. The worm would direct users to download a fake Adobe Flash player upgrade message. Once they did this, their computer would become infected and the worm would gain control over certain part of the system. There were a lot of people that were hit with this malware and the person who wrote it probably made a lot of money.

There have been a couple of other attacks that have affected social media web sites as well. These attacks included using fake videos and pictures to get people to click on them. Once the item was clicked, then the attacker had free reign to install whatever they needed to, on the person’s computer. There are still attacks that happen, but people are becoming more attuned in to being careful in what items they click on. Even on a web site such as Facebook.

Social media security – rules

You can avoid your computer being in danger when it comes to a site such as this, if you follow a certain set of rules. The first rule, is to treat social media web sites like you treat your email. Scan everything, no matter where it comes from. Also do not friend anyone that you do not know. Or if you do, check out their profile page and see if they are a real person. Most of the malware that you get will come from fake accounts. They just want to be able to have access to you and send you links.

If you follow the social media security rules, then you will have a safe time on your computer. You will be able to enjoy social media web sites as they were meant to be used.

When you are alone on your computer at night, surfing the internet, you will sometimes have a tendency to believe that being on the computer will make you totally isolated. As if no one in the world, would be able to violate the inner sanctity of your computer. But unfortunately, this is not true. When we use our computers on the internet, there are many ways that people are able to access all of our inner thoughts that we put down in digital format. Even though we may believe that our data will always be secured, it can only be that way if we work at it. When most people think about their security being violated on the computer, they mostly think about black hat hackers coming through the line remotely from another part of the world. But this not always the case. A large percentages of security breakdowns in a wireless network, happen when the perpetrator is only a few yards away from the actual network. So how can we stop this from happening. How can we keep people from accessing the network with our explicit permission. In this article, we will give you a few ways that will allow you to keep your network secured.

In Windows 7, the network security features have been made to be more effective. If you go into your control panel, you will see a wide overview on the different states of your home network. You can check the network that you are connected to and you can also create homegroups. Homegroups are a specific settings that will allow you to decide such matters as who gets to share certain data items on your computer. If the visiting computer on the network is not part of the homegroup, it is not allowed to access that part of your computer. This a good first step, but will only keep parts of your network safe. To really be sure that you are secured, we must take a look at the router.

There are a few steps that you must take with the router, so that you are sure that no one can access your network without you knowing. The first thing that you have to do, is to make sure that you change the username and password that gives you access to the router. Make sure that they are not on the default setting that they were in when you bought the router from the store. After you have done that, make sure that you have an encryption layer set up for the router. You can use WEP, WPA. or WPA II. We recommend WPA II, since it is the upgraded version of the most secured network encryption out there. Now after you set the encryption layer up, if anyone want to get on your network, they have know the password that you set up. But that might not be secured enough for your taste. You can also go in the router and set it so that someone has to have a particular MAC address to get on the network. MAC addresses are the unique number that is on your network card. Every device that connects to the internet has one. They can be spoofed, but someone would have to know your network card to be able to get the right number that will allow them on your network.

So as you can see, there are several levels of home network security that you can set up. Make sure that you do, so that you can truly surf the web secured.

People like to feel secure in anything that they do. If you drive a car, you want to make sure that it is not going to have any problems while it is on the road. You do not want to stop at a red light and the brakes do not work. The same thing applies when you are riding on an elevator. When you press the button to go to a certain floor, you expect it to stop at that floor and to not keep going. People would like that same feeling when they surf the internet. They want to be sure that when they connect their computer to the network, there will be no one trying to get into their system. They have heard all of the horror stories and have watched a ton of movies that describe the antics of black hat hackers. The average user knows that an attack on their computer can cause them financial problems. These financial problems can last for a long time. So how can you keep intruders off of Windows 7 as you surf the internet? One of the best ways is to download and install a firewall on your computer.

So you might be wondering what a firewall does exactly and how can it keep people off of your computer. Well, there are a couple of ways that we can answer that. A firewall is a program that monitors the incoming and outgoing traffic from the internet. It does this by looking at the ports on your computer. The ports are what allows your computer to have a bridge to the outside world. We could go into a more technical reading of how the ports work, but all you need to know, is that it allows the internet to come to your computer. So a firewall will close off the ports that you are not using. For a program to use a closed port, you have to give it explicit permission to do that. Once you have gave it permission, then that particular program will be able to communicate with the outside world as well. Your browser, and IM clients, are all examples of programs that use a port to connect to the internet. Using a firewall will stop any bad programs from using a port and keep allowing the good programs to continue working.

There are several ways that you can have a firewall monitor your computer as you are working. The first way is to activate the firewall that comes with your wireless router. Most modern day routers will come with a firewall already built into the firmware. You can go into the routers admin menu and set this up. If you do not surf the internet with a router and use a modem only, you can download a software firewall to protect your computer. There are several of them out there. You can read on Google which one’s are highly regarded and make your decision from there. Also be aware that Microsoft Windows 7 comes with a firewall pre-installed. You can activate it and have all of the protection that you will ever need.

As you see, a firewall is a good ideal while you are surfing the internet. Make sure you have one in place so that you can be sure that you are secured.