If you are like me you receive emails from friends, associates and business colleagues that make it obvious their computers have a Virus, Trojan, Worm or some other hacked exploit. Usually it is an email with a long string of every email address they have in the “sent to” line and a single web link in the body of the message. My first thought when I receive emails like the later is “What kind (if any) antivirus do they use?” I use www.avast.com antivirus and am very content with it. I have used McAfee, Nortons, Kaspersky and AVG in the past and they were great for a while in my opinion.
In 2012 linkedin.com got hacked and passwords get stolen. Network Solutions got hacked. The list goes on: Nissan, Dropbox, Yahoo, and Walmart to name a few others.
Even Facebook had a proliferation of users showing links to porn because of the inability of its users not to click on suspicious links.
It is amazing the percentage of people that click on links to fake banking login emails (5 percent at least.) When all the later had to do is mouse over the link to see that it was the wrong URL. There is a whole illegal industry created from “phishing” credit card info and passwords. Not to mention the solicitations that look like bills… read the fine print!
So, what does one do?
- Use different passwords and usernames for all your online activity and memberships.
- Use a good antivirus and keep it up to date in this current year’s version.
- Do not click links in suspicious emails or websites. Most of the negative issues involve a user clicking on something they shouldn’t have.
- Do not use freeware. Online free games are exploited a lot.
- Keep your computer and browsers up to date.
- Keep all software up to date (Java, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, etc…)
- Now I really didn’t want to mention this but “Oh well”… Do not view any sexual material on the internet. I have fixed a lot of computers over the years and always get the funny face with “How did that get on my computer?” The later type of sites are notorious for exploits.
All in all, do what you want in 2013 and be safe about it.