How to protect yourself online

[night-hawk-1]

These are a few of the things I use to keep myself safe when online.

Never use your name as an ID on a forum or chat site.

Never put your real name or address into your email address book.

Never use your primary ISP email address to sign up to web sites, keep it for communication with your ISP only.

Most ISPs allow you to create additional email addresses that you can change as you please or you can use hotmail, yahoo or Gmail or better still register your own domain name and get a hosting package, that means you own the name and can change ISPs without ever worring about loosing your email addresses ever.

Depending on hosting packages you can have unlimited accounts and change them as you please.
When an address starts to get spam you simply create a new email address and delete the old one.

I use an excel spread sheet to record all this information so I can quickly find web site address, user names, passwords and email addresses used, in excel this can be quickly sorted by the columbs as you please.

Never use the same password on more than one site, try to use a different user names on different websites, this will stop people doing searches on you where you may have posted some personal info allowing a stalker to get a more complete profile on you.

Passwords should be a minimum of 8 characters and contain both letters and numbers.

Also be very concerned with friends that bulk forward jokes to many people where every ones email is displayed, it is a huge problem because sooner or latter some you don’t want to have your email address will end up with it, it maybe a person you have had prir problems with or even find your self on a spammers mailing list. BBC should be used to hide all email addresses, if the senders wont or cant ask them nicely to stop sending them to you.

Things like eBay and paypal I use different email addresses, I have had phishing emails sent to my ebay email pretending to be from paypal, as I use a different email I know straight away it’s a fake.

Never login into any secure sites like eBay, paypal or internet banking from a link within an email, always type it manually, or from your links/favorites or search from google, but never a link.




It’s of utmost importance to have Antivirus software that is up to date.

Also having Anti spy ware software is important, as AV programs do not detect a lot of spyware.

  Ad-Aware Free by lavesoft is a basic program  http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

Also Spybot - Search & Destroy http://download.cnet.com/Spybot-Search-amp-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10122137.html

If your computer is vital to you it is also a good idea to keep kids of yours as many hackers use children by offering them free games, children will download and install things without a second thought, It would be safe to get them their own or create them an account that has no administrative rights to install.

[night-hawk-1]

If any of you IT types have more to add, please do

[imperfect]

Greatt stuff Hawk, thank you!!

[night-hawk-1]

I wrote it with you in mind Imp 

It could do with someone that can write better than me to tidy it up.

[*CountessA*]

Don't click onto an attachment unless you're sure you know what it is.

Some virus-senders cleverly disguise zip files as doc files or pdf files, using the Word logo or Acrobat pdf logo for the zip file which contains (of course) all sorts of nasties. It's therefore of paramount importance not to be fooled by an icon if the file is actually something else.

And of course (it shouldn't need to be said, but let's say it anyway) never open a zip file - unless you know what it is and have been expecting it, from an absolutely secure and reliable source.

[night-hawk-1]

And of course (it shouldn't need to be said, but let's say it anyway) never open a zip file - unless you know what it is and have been expecting it, from an absolutely secure and reliable source.

Yes you must trust the source of such things

[imperfect]

Awwww, your lovely, thank you Hawk!! 

It made total sense to me, I don't know if that could be classed as a good thing thought ...lol   

[frangi]

Thank you, Hawk for providing such a clear and concise resource

Thanks also for the links

Great stuff 

[gr8-expectations]

waves to the lovely frangipani

[logbox]

[size=16
DONG DONG DONGpt][/size]wake up you lot,its the early bird that catches the worm(no jokes please)

[brumbymg]

All this is very sage advice - which I follow and have done for quite some time.

For a bit of humour, if you get an email with a link, hover over the link (DON'T CLICK on it) and have a look at the url displayed at the very bottom left of the screen. You get some very blatant examples of bogus web sites showing up a lot of the time.

Aside from the emails themselves standing out like the proverbial, these links are often not shrouded with anything more than display text.