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Protect Yourself while Browsing
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Evil doers try to trick you into thinking that you are on a secure site that you've visited many times. It may look like your best friend, but it isn't. What happens is that either you've typed a familiar site improperly or received a bogus email or clicked on an impersonation link. For example you may visit and buy things from www.buywidgets.com all the time, but may type www.buyiwdgets.com by mistake getting you to a site that will trick you into giving your credit card information to them. I buy all the time from www.amazon.ca, but I'm registered with them and don't have to put my personal information in all the time and never my credit card information. There is another way that you get attacked and it's by email where the sender impersonates buywidgets.com and presents you with a 'Click Here' message that sends you to the bad site which impersonates the real company Modern browsers such as Firefox update a list of such sites every half hour and will warn you with a "suspected web forgery" message, sometimes in the banner. Make sure you pay attention to these messages from Internet Explorer, Firefox and any browser you have on your MAC. 13/01/2009 04:23 PM |
Be careful because MACS are vulnerable too. Don't believe the hype. According to a recent net survey MAC users fall prey to malware as much as PC users per capita. Since PC users outnumber MAC users by a huge amount, you hear more about the PC troubles. The best advice that you can receive is to use a separate credit card for any and all Internet transactions. Get a very good credit card. Some like American Express have excellent fraud protection for you. They believe you and monitor unusual use of your credit card. When making International transactions, it's best to use a high end credit card. Look at your receipt carefully each month even for small amounts as the crook may want to leak money out of your account a few dollars a month and then hit you with a smashing blow, thus avoiding the medium sized unusual buy monitoring that your credit card companies do. They try to establish a 'track record' with the monitoring agency. Remember, online credit card use is a heck of a lot better than when you travel and give your credit card to some waiter that you've never seen and he disappears for a while and comes back for your signature. The net is getting better and better as e-commerce grows and it's growing at a fantastic pace. One last word ... use multiple passwords as much as you can so that if somehow your password gets stolen, you can contain the theft. |
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