Tips for Surviving Threats on the Internet

by Gijo George

There are many black holes on the internet that are designed to extract your personal information to use against you. Be aware and take necessary action to prevent that from happening to you.

Even after installing expensive virus prevention mechanisms in their computer systems, many people are being cheated on Internet because of their lack of knowledge about the latest trends in cheating. Being an Internet surfer one has to acquaint with the best practices to be followed to avoid 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 it 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 written to land in a page designed to extract your information. For this 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 abandon 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. If you enable the real time option of an antivirus software it will report and destroy a virus as soon as it is encountered.