How to safeguard our personal and financial data

Here are the ways you can take either when making online transactions or simply in your day-to-day computing life to make sure your data is safeguard.

Avoid saving credit card info, etc on shopping sites
Many web sites today, such as Orbitz, Amazon, eBay, give you the option to save your credit card info so that you don’t have to type in all the information each time you want to buy something. That’s great for them, easy money and more sales, but what about you? What if someone eventually does hack into their database (and don’t worry many people are trying everyday) and downloads thousands of credit card numbers, bank account numbers, etc? It might take an extra minute, but it’s better to not save your info on any shopping site.

Do not use the same password for every last thing on the Internet
Yes we all hate passwords, but hackers love people who don’t use passwords or who use passwords like “john” or “joe”. You don’t have to keep a different password for EVERY site, that would be crazy, but definitely not just one. These days just about everyone has an eBay, Amazon, Orbitz, etc account and so if a hacker figures out one password, they’ll go ahead and try to see if it works on any other site. Make sure passwords are different a more complicated. Just throwing in a number or symbol at the end will make it hundreds of times hard for a person to crack your password!

Always think before providing information when solicited
If you ever get an email that has a link in it that requires ANY personal information, make sure you go to the web site yourself manually by typing in the address. Half the time links in emails point to fake addresses with very close names. Also, if you post items on sites like eBay or Craigslist, you will always be bombarded by scams from Nigeria, etc that sound way too good to be true (like someone would actually pay more for your item than what you listed it at)!!! And just because a web site exists does not mean it it legitimate! If you’ve never heard of the site before, just type it into Google once and see if anything like “XXX IS A SCAM” pops up!

Clear your browser’s cache after an online transaction
Sometimes your browser will save certain information you typed into forms, etc when you are online, so it’s always good to clear that after you’re done. Here’s an article I wrote previously on how to clear your browser history. Also, if you get that message sometimes from your browser asking you whether you want it to automatically save your passwords, etc, click NO. It’s another small pain, but it might help you one day!

Make sure the URL has an HTTPS instead of HTTP
The S makes all the difference! You’ll notice that when you buy something from Amazon or another big site, once you being to checkout, the URL always starts with a HTTPS. This means that the communication between your computer and their server is secure and encrypted. If someone tries to read the data as it travels across the Internet, they won’t be able to understand or decipher it. If you’re buying something from a smaller site and they don’t have HTTPS, just call them and buy it. Not worth risking data passing unencrypted over the net.

Use a secure Internet browser when you are online
Firefox is considered more secure than IE and that’s what a number of sites also have tested. Personally, I use Firefox and you should consider it if you’re using IE 7. IE 7 has more security features than ever before, but it still has lots of holes also. Using a more secure browser can help protect against browser hijacking, etc. Anyway, most viruses are written for IE since it’s more common, so it’s more likely to be hacked.