The Internet can be a wonderful place. It puts information, entertainment and communication at our fingertips. It allows us to shop without leaving our home.
However, the internet can be a dangerous place unless we take proper precautions. With high speed connections, we are vulnerable to a number of threats. Here are a few of the safety issues facing us and some tips on how to stay safe. We have provided some useful links for more information at the end of this page.
Protect Your Computer From Hackers
Secure your computer with passwords. When you turn on your computer or log in, make sure every login name including administrator requires a password. Experts recommend using eight characters and mixing letters, both upper and lower case with numbers and symbols. They also recommend against using any combination of letters that spell a real word or a name. This prevents people from guessing your password and accessing your computer without your permission and using a combination of numbers, letters and symbols thwarts what is known as brute force attacks.
Keep your computer's operating system up to date with free service patches from Microsoft. As they discover vulnerabilities in Windows, they provide special fixes for them.
Learn about the security features in Windows and use them to protect yourself.
Protect Yourself
There are several threats that need addressing. We have all heard about identity theft. This problem is not limited to the internet but using the internet is a much faster and easier way to steal your identity. How can you protect yourself? First, turn off the feature in Windows that saves login and passwords to your machine. Should a hacker get through your security, this will prevent the use of on line accounts you may have. Second, look carefully at your email and do not reply to any that ask you to verify important identity information by return email. Banks do not send email asking you to verify this information by return email. It is very easy to make an email appear to be from someone other then who is actually sending it.
Viruses and spyware are two of the biggest threats today. Of the two, we think that spyware is the biggest threat because most of it is not detected by antivirus programs. Spyware collects data about you and forwards it to marketing companies who in turn sell your email address and your internet preferences to others. This generates junk email and pop-ups. It also takes computer resources to run these programs so it slows your machine down. At its worst, it can even log every keystroke you make on your computer and at the best, it can send you email about specific products and services you may be interested in. Spyware can be very hard to remove as it runs silently in the background. The first you may know about it is when the number of spyware programs has built up to a point where your computer barely functions due to the number of spyware programs running. How does spyware get into your machine? It gets in through the downloading of so called free programs. Have you ever seen a solicitation for a free internet search bar? Maybe a free game. Most of these so called free programs come with spyware attached. Legislation is pending to make spyware illegal. Although this sounds good, we have no control over what other countries allow and the internet is world wide so it is possible to infect your machine from anyplace on earth that has a web site running.
Viruses are a close cousin of spyware except that they are malicious and designed to damage your computer or to hijack it for such uses as sending out email under your name. Viruses also multiply and infect anyone you may have sent an email to. Many viruses automatically find your address book and send out email to each one on your list without your knowledge. Anyone seeing an email from you assumes it is safe and opens it without thinking. Viruses at their worst can delete valuable data from your computer and even cripple your machine to the point where the only fix is to complete wipe out the hard drive and re install windows. How do you protect yourself? The best defense is to have a good antivirus program installed and to make sure it is updated on at least a weekly basis. Renew the subscription for it when it is due. Anti-virus programs and anti-spyware really depend on looking for known viruses and spyware. As new ones come out, they update the programs they are looking for. If you do not update or lapse your subscription, you are not catching the latest viruses or spyware.
Kids and Computers
If your son or daughter is over five years old, there is a good chance they may know more then you do about computers. The internet can be a dangerous place for children. What are some of the dangers how do we keep our children safe? First, remember that they face the same dangers from the internet that we do regarding viruses and spyware. They need to be protected from this. One of the ways to do this is to use the account features in Windows 2000 and Windows XP to create a separate login for them and restrict the right to install programs. This blocks most spyware and viruses. It might be inconvenient for you to help them install legitimate new programs but it helps keep then safe.
Chat rooms are a wonderful way for kids to keep in touch with their friends. They can also be a very dangerous place. Your son or daughter may think they have made a new friend on line. People pretend to be someone they are not and one of their goals is to lure young people into meeting. Their purposes are not always honorable. Know who your son or daughter are chatting with. Never allow them to give out personal information to someone they don't know in person. Monitor their conversations. I realize that teens want privacy but we as parents also have to protect them. Most chat programs have a logging feature that saves chat to a text file. Turn it on. Skim it from time to time. You can also use some of the same spyware programs that we discussed above. There are legitimate publishers for key logging software and you can see exactly what your child is doing on line.
Inappropriate web sites can be a real problem. We monitor what our children see on TV or at the movies and we monitor what they listen to on the radio. Use the same precautions with the internet. One of the easiest ways to do that is to check the internet history. You will see exactly where they have been on the internet.
Finally, remember that the internet is a wonderful place for kids when used safely. They can visit museums on line, look up things that would fill several libraries and visit places in distant lands all from their computer.
