Of course, it's also wise to check out the address at the top of the page after arriving at your destination, also. You should also stop and think when something pops up instructing you to enter your user and password information.
Also recommended is to use complex and unique passwords for each of your accounts, maintain an up-to-date browser and operating system and use updated security software from a reliable vendor.
When purchasing security software, ensure you are not buying counterfeit software or being tricked into purchasing scareware. Scareware is bogus security software that normally prompts a user to run a scan of their system, which reflects all kinds of bad things going on. The problem is that the problems normally do not really exist and the protection they are selling doesn't really protect you, either.
So far as buying counterfeit software, it normally doesn't protect you very well and it might even have some malicious code built right into the program.
While the FaceBook attack is the flavor of the week, it’s not the only social networking site that has been targeted in the recent past. Twitter and MySpace have been the targets of recent attacks, too. SC Magazine did a recent article where a security researcher from Websense was quoted as saying they have detected more than 200,000 sites impersonating the above mentioned social networking sites.
Going beyond social networking sites, financial, auction, e-commerce are frequently attacked, too. The common denominator is sites where criminals can harvest information and turn it into money. Please note that people interested in doing a little bit of due diligence on you personally might see what you are putting up on these sites. I’ve recently seen this presented as a “best practice” when doing background checks on people.
The key is to adopt the known best practices if you enjoy using these sites. Another wise thing to do is to be extremely thoughtful about what information you post on them and how it might be used against you.
Anything you post on these sites can and will be used against you if the wrong person gets their hands on it. In the end, being mindful of the information you are posting on a social networking site is probably the best defense you have. After all, you never know who is looking at it!
Article comments
1 - Jeannie Danna
Ed, I had my essays stollen word for word over at Wordpress. They advised me to file a DMCA against the scraper site Demo-research-politics.com hosted at The planet. I filed one and Akismet contacted me saying they had disabled their link. I ask why couldn't WP disable it? Needless to say I Like it over here at BC! Except for a handful of family and readers my little blog is full of cob-webs. I wont even write there anymore so I have to figure out how to get my material out of there. Would this be of interest to you? I mean for a future article on how safe are our blogs? Jeannie :)