Staying Safe Online

In today’s world, almost every second of our daily life is somehow connected to our electronics. In olden times everyone was sure on how to protect themselves from crime but unfortunately, nowadays we haven't been educated on how to save ourselves from cyber crimes.

A common method of attacking a computer is using a virus. There are a lot of types of viruses but the most are circulated through emails or through web pages. These viruses usually ask you to do an action before they infect your computer. 

By clicking on the link, the link executes a rogue program on your computer.

Have you ever stumbled across a page that shows you a warning saying that your computer has a virus on it and asks you to download an anti-virus to protect your computer? But guess what, this ‘anti-virus’ is actually a virus that you are downloading. So these hackers used their brains and decided to disguise a virus as an anti-virus. When stumbling across a page of such sort immediately close it, the longer it is open the more chances are that there more chances that it is downloading packages locally. In other words, websites sometimes save cookies which are documents saved by websites about your preferences and data about you. Sometimes if you just close the tab it may not suffice as some browsers automatically continue to download cookies. Thus it is safe to just straight away kill the browser. 

Worms disseminate without user intervention. They typically start by exploiting a software vulnerability. Once the device has been infected with it, the worm will attempt to find and infect other computers. Similar to a virus, worms can propagate via email, websites, or network-based software.

A Trojan horse program is software that claims to be one program whilst infecting your device, by performing something different behind the scenes. For example, a program that claims to speed up your computer may actually be sending confidential information to a remote intruder.

Often while travelling, on the pretext of saving mobile data, we tend to connect to random wireless internet connections. What we do not realise is that this connection may often not be secure and hackers may be getting your personal data. There have been incidents where hackers have gotten access to all the users’ password of a public network.

Phishing is a common act done in which hackers create fake pages to steal information. This mainly involves sending you an email from a legitimate company in the same format the company uses. The email claims that you have to do an action that involves re-typing some or the other password. What you don’t realise is that this website that the email asks you to go to is not genuine but it looks just like the legitimate website.

Another time to help secure your online presence is that when shopping online, or visiting websites for online banking or other sensitive transactions, always make sure that the site’s address starts with “https”, instead of just “http”, and has a padlock icon in the URL field. This indicates that the website is secure and uses encryption to scramble your data so it can’t be intercepted by others. Also, be on the lookout for websites that have misspellings or bad grammar in their addresses. They could be copycats of legitimate websites. Avoid clicking any links from the email addresses you do not trust. More importantly look out for sender’s email address, which might have the correct label but not the legitimate email/domain.

This is cliche to say this but it is very important to have complex passwords which are difficult to guess. Many browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari automatically suggest your secure passwords and it is logical to use those passwords as your computer automatically remembers them. Other steps you can take to stay safe are to use a firewall, not randomly clicking on harmful websites, be a selective sharer and to keep all software to date.

Lastly, keep your fingers crossed and hope you are not a victim of such a scam.