How to Avoid Growing Threats on The Internet

Wed, Sep 10, 2008, by Gijo George

Security

There are many black holes on the internet that are designed to deceive and extract personal information to use against you. Having an awareness of these threats can safeguard you.

Even after installing expensive virus prevention mechanisms in their computer systems, many people are being cheated on Internet. This is because of their lack of knowledge about the latest trends in cheating. As an Internet surfer, one has to acquaint himself with the best practices to be followed to avoid these traps all the way.

  • Ensure the genuineness of an offer you receives through email. This means that you have to first make sure that it is received from a reliable source or person. Sometimes it may turn out to be a disguised effort to extract your personal information.
  • Before click a link in an email make sure that the embedded URL is pointed towards to the correct location. It is very easy to get cheated by the external appearance of a link to a genuine website, but internally it is coded to land in a page designed to extract your information. To identify this type of threat just place your mouse above the link and verify the link by looking at the status bar of your computer. The status bar will show the correct url. If you find the url is not to the correct web site just avoid clicking it. Don’t forget to mark the email as a Spam.
  • If you are using a public computer never allow the system to store passwords for you. If you inadvertently clicked “Remember password” option, just clear the Private data including stored password option also. This will erase all the browsing history, cookies installed and your passwords stored in the computer.
  • Choose a strong password for your emails, which is hard to be cracked. Also change it periodically.
  • Finally make sure that your Antivirus software has got a real time scanning option and it is kept on always. You can test it. If you enable the real time option of an antivirus software it will report and destroy a virus as soon as it is encountered.
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1 Comments For This Post

  1. Tom Says:

    This is a very good article. It is good to educate ourselves about the latest scams in Internet to avoid them. Like described in the article, there are so many traps that comes in disguised form which is very hard to find out.

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