ONLINE SECURITY GUIDE

According to Techradar.com Only The Paranoid Survive is a tract on corporate fundamentals penned by Intel's ex-Chairman Andy Grove. The words should, however, be tattooed on the back of every PC owner's mouse hand. The internet is full of thieves and vagabonds united by one common goal – to separate you from your hard-earned cash. Here's our guide to staying one step ahead of the bad guys. Follow our internet security tips to stay safe online and you can shop, surf and socialise online, and sleep soundly afterwards too. 1. Guerrilla psychology Don't be fooled into thinking cyber crime is a technical problem with a purely technical solution. A firewall and antivirus software can protect your computer, but they won't keep you and your identity safe. Social engineering is the black art of influencing people, and it's the hacker's best friend. In essence, hackers can control us thanks to a refined understanding of human characteristics such as trust, ignorance, greed, the need to be liked, the desire to help and plain old gullibility. Not even the most sophisticated software can hope to protect us from ourselves. In order to stay safe, educate yourself about social engineering. Take a trip to the Symantec websitefor a brilliant briefing on the subject. If you get keen, check outThe Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Securityby Kevin Mitnick. 2. Avoid being a mule Working from home, earn £500 a week commission. It sounds to good to be true, and it is. Scammers pass stolen cash to unsuspecting people, who transfer it back to the thieves via electronic payment. Your job with the work taken out is money laundering. Beware. 3. Set a serious password If you're struggling to create passwords that will stump a hacker, check out Microsoft's guide to adding complexity to access codesin such a way that you can still remember the logon. When you've made a password, you should rate its relative security. Microsoft offers an excellent password checking tool, which can be found here. 4. Split your emails Rather than linking Facebook, Twitter, newsgroups, forums, shopping and banking sites to one email address, use multiple addresses. As a minimum, use one for social activities and one for financial business. Your social address will rightly draw more attention than your business one – that's the way you want it to be. If the former is hacked, it won't be as nightmarish as losing control of your financial address. 5. Take care on public networks Never, under any circumstances, use a public network for financial transactions. Only send your personal and financial details over a network you've set up yourself, or one you know to be secure. Who knows what horrors are lurking on the hard disk of that internet cafe machine, or somewhere between it and its internet access point? Hackers have also been known to set up laptops to broadcast networks with names such as 'Free Internet Access' in hotels. They'll let you pass internet traffic through them and harvest any juicy details as you type. 6. Virtualise The truly paranoid should virtualise. The idea is simple: create a virtual PC, use it to surf the internet and, when you've done, destroy it, along with any viruses that may have infected it while you were online. Running a virtual version of Ubuntu from within Ubuntu is likely to be the easiest way of achieving this style of computing, and it's likely to be very safe too. 7. Anatomy of an iffy shop By making online shops look slick, official and safe, online criminals hope to dupe us into disclosing credit card details. Fake shopping sites, like much online criminality, rely on social engineering. There are, however, some tell-tale signs that should help you spot an iffy shop. First, avoid sites that ask for cash, cheque or virtual cash payments only – only do business with sites that accept credit cards. Next, ensure that the shop has a physical address, ideally in the UK – shopping abroad throws up more potential problems. 8. Be wary of Facebook There are two key areas of social networking security – the technical sphere and the human one. Technical security is about setting up your profile correctly – your favourite site will explain how, so follow its guides. Next is the human aspect of security and our old friend, social engineering. No quantity of settings and checkboxes can prevent a user from willingly complying with the bad guys, and this is what they depend on. There's one simple rule to follow here: don't do or say anything online that you wouldn't do or say in real life. 9. A price on your identity If you're in doubt about the value of your credentials, visit www.everyclickmat ters.com/victim /assessment.html. Complete the questionnaire and discover what you're worth to a scammer… Bo ifiok