Most people who use the internet on a regular basis have several different ways that their data can be leaked to the public. Between the heavy usage of social networks, logging into your email and checking bank accounts from another person machine, we expose ourselves everyday to the risk of someone stealing our data. This is why we have to be very concerned when it comes to protecting our secrets online. We should not let anyone or any company tell us that they have our security interest in their hearts and just trust them with the data that we hand over. We need to do little things ourselves to make sure that the data is never compromised. And when it comes to the different services that we use every day on the web, we can achieve that goal. All we need is a little guidance on how we can get this done. If you follow these simple rules, you will be able to cut down your chance at having your data stolen by half.

The first thing that you need to do to make sure that your data is always safe is to make sure that your passwords are in a secure place. When we sign up for a lot of web sites, we can easily start to lose track of our login credentials. Or so that we don’t have to keep track, we can fall into the trap of using the same login and password on every site that we visit. Both of these conditions can lead to you easily getting your data stolen. If you want to make sure that your privacy stays safe, use different login credentials with each web site that you visit. Also use an encrypted software solution like Keepass to store your passwords.

Another step that will keep your online privacy safe is to be careful what you say on the social media sites that you are a member of. Most people love the fact that they can share their lives online but there is a chance that you will share too much. You do not want to give identity thieves too much information that they can use against you. Think about what you say before you type it and remember that it is in the public domain once you do. Remembering that will keep you from spreading too much information online.

Step three is to be careful of the web sites that you visit. 99% of the web sites that are available on the web are totally safe to go to. But it is that one percent that you have to be worried about. If a site does not give you a good feeling when you visit it then you just leave from there. Always follow your gut instinct when you are online. It will help more times than it will hurt.

To continue on with the last point, not only should you be careful with what web sites that you visit, you should also be concerned about links that you run across. The wrong link can lead you to install software that will invade your privacy by stealing your data. Even if it is someone that you know sending you the link, you should always be careful about clicking on them. Also, to go along with this and our last point, is if you do click the link, make sure that you scan with an antivirus anything that it might download to your computer.

Keeping your privacy safe while online is a big deal. Make sure that you follow these precautions when you are online to make sure that your privacy is kept intact.  

The one thing that all of us worry about when we use the computer is that a new and unknown virus will come along and destroy all of the data that we have saved. So to keep that from happening, we do what the experts tell us to do. We buy or get a free copy of the latest and greatest antivirus software that is on the market and we install it on our computers. After the software is installed we let it examine the computer files that are already on there to see if there is a problem. Before we do that, we make sure that it is updated so that it will be able to catch any new infections. And now we just wait. But is there an easier way to do this? Some people say yes and it comes in the form of online antivirus scanners.

Several years ago, some of the third party security companies that are out there, found out that they can create an online version of the scanner tools. It started by letting people upload a file to their server and see if there was an infection in it. It went from that to the companies creating full blown tools that would scan the persons whole computer. This became a great tool for people to use. But the question remains; should you use an online scanner instead of one already installed on your computer?

The answer to that is no. You can use the two as a complement to one another but there is no way that you should use the online version of the tool without having an offline version installed and updated on your computer. The reason why is simple. Most antivirus scanners that are installed on your computer will scan new files that are introduced to your system automatically. This is not like the online version where you would have to upload a file every time that it is new to your system. More than likely you would get tired of doing that and you would start to use judgment calls. If the file looked safe in your eyes or at the very least if it came from what you thought was a safe place, then you wouldn’t bother to upload it for scanning. When it comes to matters such as this, it is best to let the computer handle it automatically.

An online scanner works best if it is used for scanning suspicious files and if somehow you are not able to get your antivirus working because of some strange infection. But it is not the best solution if you need full time protection on your machine.  For cases such as that, it is best to go with the tried and true method of installing the antivirus on your system.

Here you can find a good list of online antivirus scanners.

If you are like anyone else, all you want is a secured computer to be able to use. There are too many ways that someone can use the computer against you these days, so you do all that you can to try to protect yourself. It may seem like it is hard road to trek, but if you keep a steady vigilance over your computer, you will start to enjoy the benefits of doing it. If you own a computer, then it is part of your responsibility to keep yourself safe on it. It is the same as if you own a car. It is your responsibility to know how to drive the car safely. The same thing holds up when it comes to computers. You must listen to the messages that you see on how you can protect yourself while you are online. If you do listen to the messages, then as we said earlier, you will start to enjoy the benefits of having a safe computer.

One of the main benefits of listening to all of the safety messages about using your computer on the internet is that you will not have to worry about catching any malware while you surf the web. When people do not listen to what is told to them, they tend to get caught up in the traps that are laid down by black hat hackers. This includes common warnings such as do not click on links that are sent by strangers and to scan all email attachments that you receive. Of course even the best of us forget to follow these rules 100% of the time. We are only human. But some of us will know the rules, but blatantly click on the links anyway. And then when their computer starts to mess up a couple of days later, they claim that they did nothing wrong and that it is the systems fault. They never put together that their actions may have caused the system to mess up.

If you are a person who listens to the experts that tell you to set up your firewall before you start to surf the internet, then you have just made your computer safety jump up to about 85%. There are people who ignore messages such as this and surf the internet with their firewalls turned off. They do this for a variety of reasons but the biggest culprit is that one of their programs that they like to use does not work while the firewall is on. Instead of learning how to open a port on their firewall settings, they turn the whole thing off and leave themselves vulnerable. This is not good strategy for anyone to use. Just read the manual that came with the software or go to their web site if it didn’t come with a manual. Learn how to set your firewall up properly so that you can use your favorite programs and remain safe at the same time. 
 
If you keep your computer secured, then you will be able to surf the internet almost worry free.

If you have a job that makes you deal with a lot of data that runs through your computer, you must make sure that you have a secured working environment. If you do not, then there is a chance that it can hurt your or your employee’s business. If you have made the move to Windows 7, then you can be sure that you have one of the most secured working environments of any operating system. But there are ways that you can make it more secured. No operating system will be able to handle the litany of threats that exist on the internet right out of the box. It will need something extra to be able to do this. Here are a couple of ways that you can make sure that you have a clean working environment.

The first thing that you need to do to guarantee that you have a clean working environment, is to set up a regiment that will make sure that your computer is bug free. When you download certain programs, they may have a bug that your anti virus can not yet detect. So, when you originally downloaded the program, it was able to slip through all of the sensors that would have normally went off when a piece of malware enters your computer. To correct this mistake, you need to update your anti virus software and run another scan on your computer. Some people think that running two anti virus solutions on the machine will help with a problem such as this. That is not true. When you run two anti virus on the same computer, they will set each other off and possibly erase certain features from one of the programs. So just stick with one anti virus program, and run a full system scan at least once a week.

The second thing that you can do, in making sure that your Windows 7 system is a secured environment, is to make sure that you check the logs of your firewall or router, and see if there has been any unusual activity. If you are working on a project that has very sensitive information involved with it, there may be people that try to get that information from you. They will try to test certain weak points in your network security and find a way to get around this. This is why you might have to take the unusual step of checking the logs for traffic that is requesting permission to access your machine. If you do not understand the data, then get someone from your IT department that will. Someone who has the basic knowledge of corporate network security will be able to read a server or router log, and tell you if someone is trying to penetrate your system. Remember, if the data is valuable enough, someone will try to go after it.

You will normally hear that you can protect your computer by just installing anti virus and letting it work. Sometimes, to have a truly secured computing experience, you have to go a little deeper than that. You have to fine tune the security until it is protecting you from even the most advanced threats.

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.

Over the years, people have come up with many inventive ways to keep all of the passwords that they use, together in one place. Some people will write it in Microsoft’s notepad and just save it in My Documents. Others will use an actual physical notepad and keep it by the computer as they surf the web. They only pull it out when they get to a certain web site that needs it. Some even still, might use Microsoft Word and try to save the password list in a document format. They do this so that they can try to lock it to keep it safe. All of these methods provides you an ease of use, that will allow you to get the password that you need at anytime. But these methods are useless, when it comes to protecting the password from someone trying to look at it. What you need, is a proper solution that will both store your password and keep them protected at all times. In this article, we will show you how to do this. We will help you keep your password safe from prying eyes.

Safe passwords? Encryption!

You have several options when it comes to keeping your passwords both safe and in one place. But all of these solutions have one thing in common. The use of encryption. Your passwords should use some type of encryption to keep others from being able to see it. Even if they find the file that the passwords are on, they still should not be able to get the information. We will focus on two ways of doing this and you can choose whichever method you think would work best for you.

Encrypted folder

The first solution, is that you can create an encrypted folder that would protect anything that goes inside of it. This includes any type of file and not just your password. The process is easy and once you have done it, you will wonder why you waited this long. All you have to do is create a folder like you would normally do on your hard drive. After you create the folder, place the files that you want to protect inside of it. Once that is done, get ready to encrypt that folder. You can use a program such as Truecrypt to get this part of the job done. It will walk you through a wizard, that will give you many options. Pick the options that work best for you and then close the program. After that, you now have your passwords in an encrypted folder. No one will be able to get to them. You can also repeat this same process with a USB thumb drive. This would allow you to take the password with you in a secured format. If you lost it, it would still keep the data inside of it safe.

Special password storing tools

The other way that you can keep all of your passwords secured, is to use a program such as Keepass. This program stores your password, username and other information inside of a encrypted database. You will need a master password to get inside of this database. Once in there, you can create new entries and they will automatically be protected. You can also send the database files wherever you want and no one will be able to get in them. Unless you gave them the master password, no one would be able to access the database files. This is a great solution when you want to keep everything a little more organized than just a folder.

As you see, we have shown you several ways of how you can keep your passwords both organized and secured. If you want to keep your data safe, this is the best way.

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.