General Guidelines For Safe Online communication
Online communication may result in a damaged PC or loss of privacy. The web is full of people who misrepresent themselves for the sake of malicious actions. It is possible to be anonymous in the cyber world, which greatly sabotages the authenticity of communication and enables deception for criminal purposes.
When engaging in online communication by using social software like IM, chatrooms, virtual worlds and social network services, you may encounter hackers, crackers, scammers, web bullies, identity thieves, sexual predators and more. They will most likley misrepresent themselves in order to gain your trust. They will try to seduce you using various means, so that you give away private information or give them access to your PC.
The best protection against being victimized is simply not giving any private information over the web to strangers under any circumstances. There are a few golden rules you can follow:
- Don’t give away any private information when communicating online with strangers.
- Never give away your passwords for the PC, IM program , social network service, etc. to anyone, not even to your friends. If you suspect that your passwords were exposed change them immediately.
- Don't use usernames or nicknames on the web that may reveal private information like year of birth, town, school and place of work. For example: Britney1980 is not a good nickname.
- Don't accept files by email or IMs from strangers. It could be malware.
- Don’t fill private information in your profile on social network services, virtual worlds, IM programs etc.
- Don't send personal photos or your family photos to people you don't know.
- When publishing personal photos on the web, make sure that there are security options allowing you to control the population that has access to the photos.
- If you have a blog, a personal website, a profile in social network services, make sure your personal photos are not exposed to the entire web population. Protect your photos by password, security settings etc. Give access only to friends.
- Don’t pay using websites you don't know well or trust. When you pay on the Internet make sure that the website uses a security protocol (=SSL); when you enter a secured zone look for an icon of a lock on the bottom toolbar. On the page where you enter your credit card information make sure that the URL is prefixed by "https://".