Protect Your ID – Keep Safe Online
The Internet offers many wonderful resources to people of all ages and provides you with a quick and easy way to shop, bank and socialise form the comfort of your own home, but as with any resource that is shared by such as vast number of people worldwide there are a number of individuals who use the Internet to take advantage of others, and so it is important you understand how to keep safe whilst you are surfing online.
Online Threats
There are a number of online threats you should be aware of when you are using the Internet which could impact your personal identity security and these can range from malware that can attack your computer and steal personal data from your system through to online scams that are designed to trick you into revealing key information about yourself such as your bank account details and passwords. Here are just a few examples of the online threats that you could be exposed to when using the Internet, and how to protect your identity against them.
Malware
Certain types of malware (known as spyware) are designed to infect your computer and then record private information about your online activities to transmit to third parties. Keyloggers for example record the keystrokes you input on your keyboard in sequential order, and can also take screen prints of the page you were on at the time of typing and this can be used by identity thieves and fraudsters to record and steal your personal account log ins when you are accessing online email, banking or shopping websites. Adware is also a common problem on the Internet, and is designed to record what pages you commonly visit in order to direct the adverts you see whilst online, and although this is not a high risk security threat it does impose on your privacy. It is very important that you have adequate computer security in place from a leading provider such Norton, MacAfee, Kaspersky or AVG, and also a firewall.
Scams
There are hundreds of scams operating online, and many of these are designed to trick you into revealing personal information about yourself such as your online account log ins or your credit card details. When you are logging onto any online account make sure you are going through the correct homepage each time and never log in via an email link, as you have no way of guaranteeing this will direct you to right place and there are many sophisticated fake websites designed to look like your normal log in pages which actually record your password details so that fraudsters can then access your real account.
You should also be very careful when shopping online and never input your personal payment details onto a website that does not have full security in place which should include full Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption shown by a locked golden padlock in the address bar and the prefix ‘https’ before the website URL. You should also check to see if the website has additional security such as a VeriSign logo, and you will need to follow the link to ensure this is a legitimate logo.