Computer Crimes and How to Prevent Them

kudoswd
December 20, 2012

Computers are one of the most important technologies in today’s world and because of this there has been a huge increase in computer crimes. Most computer crimes these days are committed over the internet and this is a whole subsection named ‘netcrime’ and this article will teach you how to protect yourself from any potential cyber threats.

Try to come up with strong passwords for different websites that will be hard to guess or duplicate. A strong password is a long string of characters with a mix of numbers, symbols and lower and upper case letters. The strongest passwords are the ones that are hard to guess or duplicate, try not to use words that mean a lot to you because people might be able to guess. You should avoid using sequences or repeated characters (e.g. 12345678, abcdefg or 11111111) these are going to be the easiest passwords for cyber criminals to guess. The safest passwords will be ones that look completely random and are hard to remember.

One of the biggest threats to your online security can be on social networking sites. Personal information can be taken from your social network profiles if you are not careful and there have been many cases of internet fraud committed due to this. The way you should think about posting on your social networking sites should be that if you wouldn’t like to see the information printed on a newspaper then you shouldn’t be posting it on the internet. Try to make your profile as secure and private as you can so that only the people you trust will be able to access the information that you want them to see.

Emails are another method that cyber criminals will use to collect information from you. There are many known scams where a person will receive an email from somebody claiming to be a bank asking them to update their details, the email will be sent to a mass of people in the hope that at least one of them will read it and take action. Most of the time the sender will be claiming to be a bank with which you do not associate yourself but for some, the emails appear to have been sent from the bank that they hold their accounts with. In any case that you receive an email asking for personal information you should first check the email address from the sender. If the email address isn’t coming from the main domain of the company’s website then it probably hasn’t been sent from the legitimate sender. More importantly, most banks go out of their way to stress that they do not ask for personal information through email. If you are ever in doubt you should contact the company who the email claims to be to check if the email is genuine.

You should also be fully aware of the risks involved in using your credit or debit card to make payments online. These can be one of the worst mistakes to make because you could have given anybody the details needed to spend your money. An effort should be made to only use well known and trusted websites to purchase products and if possible use services such as PayPal who enable you to transfer money to buyers and vice versa in a secure environment. You should look out for the padlock symbol in the browser window frame; this will mean that the website is implementing HTTPS, this stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and is a widely used communications protocol for secure communication over a computer network.

You should always be cautious when browsing the internet and entering personal data, be wary of the common scams and always be on your toes to ensure that you do not get hit by a cyber-criminal.

This post was written by Brad Warmbold on behalf of Olliers Criminal Solicitors .