A new breed of criminal is rising; the techno-thief as technology has improved vastly over the last decade the criminal element within our society has evolved with it to become a very serious threat to our property and identity.
In the online world this is where crooks can hide behind emails, websites and fake or stolen identities.
Unfortunately for us they would like to get their hands on our money and would seem to stop at nothing to get at it.
In the online banking world there are a few tips and tricks that you need to follow to help you prevent being techno-robbed.
When I worked as a systems admin for a company I was fed up of people using very simple crack able passwords i.
e.
using their car number plate or birthday etc.
I devised a quick program that blocked using personal data and implemented it.
I also did a quick slide show on the importance of protecting your password which is vital in securing your funds.
I mainly emphasised about password strength.
I tend to use two words with a number in the middle with control characters at the beginning and end.
This works well as when your password expires after ninety days on most systems you just up the number in the middle.
Very easy to remember and retain control of the information.
Remember the important issues associated with online banking a bank will never ask for your PIN or your account password however they may ask you for maybe 2 digits of it in different places.
There is a program that I came across some years ago where you could pretend to be any server i.
e.
you could pretend to be sending mails from the Microsoft server and this I found was a particular threat as many people are still falling for email phishing.
Apart from a prank there was pulled this software has some very dangerous uses many people have eBay or PayPal accounts.
These companies will only send you an email in their respective email inboxes.
Any other email is likely to be bogus if in any doubt forward the email to the respective company.
eBay does a very good job of collecting these emails and promoting information on their site about fraudulent activities.
The best weapon against online fraud is to keep up to date with scam websites in forums.
Internet scams are very damaging and as more and more business is done online there will be potential for criminals to do real financial damage.
Think carefully about online offers.
A recent quite serious survey was performed by the FDA (Food and Drugs Administration) these are the people responsible for licensing drugs and protecting the end user ourselves from harm.
They bought Viagra from various sources of the internet and traced if it was genuine or fake.
There was an alarming amount of fake drugs on the internet.
The real drug can always be traced back to the source, having worked in the pharmaceutical business as an automation validation engineer I can tell you that drug traceability is taken very seriously indeed.
This example is something that you would put inside yourself so you need to be very careful what you order and always get good recommendations of trusted websites.
Perform a who is search and find who owns the website etc.
Always be careful online be safe with your money, passwords, credit card information.
Buy from recommended websites or ones where you can go and see the company if you have a complaint.