How to Protect Yourself Online

With the recent influx of large scale hacking attacks, and an increasing number of ways your private information can be vulnerable, it's more important than ever to know how to best protect yourself online. We'll review some easy ways to help protect your personal information

LastPass is a browser plugin that will remember and auto-fill your passwords and logins for websites, but it does much more than that. For an in depth look at LastPass and its many features, check out this Security Now Podcast with Steve Gibson. Two of the major challenges in password are creating strong, memorable passwords (often very long), and maintaining different passwords for different sites (if your email account login is compromised, you don't want your bank account login to be vulnerable as well). LastPass addresses both of these issues

ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com maintains a database of compromised personal data that has been leaked to the Internet. You can type in your email address to see if you are listed in a leaked database. If the results come back positive, then you should, as the name suggests, change any passwords associated with that email address.

Virtual Credit Card

Many financial institutions offer the ability to create a virtual credit card number with its own limit, so that should it be compromised, the consequences are minor. You can change your virtual card number without having to get a new physical card.

Google Checkout/Paypal

Using a third party checkout service where available limits the exposure of your personal financial information to the retailers.

Common Sense

Always be cautious when clicking on email and social networking links. Look for the "https" in your address bar when submitting personal information to a site. Don't do anything private on public insecure wireless hotspots.