When you think "Internet safety," you're probably thinking about the kids on TV talking to strangers in elusive chat rooms, who give the strangers their pictures and addresses and end up having the police swoop in to save the day when the strangers turn up on their doorsteps. We laugh, but that kind of thing really does happen, although that's not where the concept of Internet safety ends. The graphic below explains the three parts of Internet safety and is courtesy of the now-defunct "Click Clever, Click Safe" campaign from the UK Council for Child Internet Safety:
When sitting in front of your computer in the privacy of your own home, you may let your guard down. After all, it's not like someone can reach out of your computer and physically attack you, so you're often lulled into a false sense of security. Unfortunately, this is entirely the wrong approach to Internet safety, and this attitude can get you into serious trouble if you're not careful. Most people know not to hand out personal information to anyone who asks, and this holds true online as well. Even if you're not computer-savvy, it's important to take the time and measures to maintain your personal safety and protect your personal information online. Here are a few things to look out for:
- Phishing/Pharming - Email or instant message scams that are disguised to look like legitimate communications from a friend or business. Oftentimes you are provided with a link to click on to perform some action, but instead of being taken to the legitimate website you're redirected to a website designed to capture your information while looking identical to the official website. The most common forms of these scams attempt to obtain your bank, online shopping, or social media account usernames and passwords.
- Clickjacking/mousetrapping - Both are technical tricks to get you to trigger a certain action or prevent you from closing a website until an action is triggered, usually some sort of software download or authorization. These attacks are crafted to be transparent to you and difficult to disable, so be careful where you click. If you can't close a webpage that is employing a mousetrapping attack, press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC on your keyboard, then close your web browser from the Task Manger with the "End Task" button.
- Spam/Unsolicited Email - Just like with the regular mail, companies or nefarious individuals blast large amounts of unsolicited email out to random email addresses, hoping to get someone to click on their link and/or buy their product. If it seems too good to be true or looks suspicious, mark the email as spam and delete it. Don't open emails that land in your spam mailbox either, unless they ended up there by mistake - sometimes these emails contain special tracking images that will tell the spammer that they have a valid email address when your email client loads them.
- Hoax Emails - Email chain letters that warn of viruses or impending doom if you don't forward it to five of your friends in the next eight hours. Just mark them as spam and delete them, nothing is going to happen to you.
- Browser Hijacking - This occurs when a program on your computer (typically malicious in nature, but may just be a benign software developer looking to make a little extra cash) installs a browser extension that shows extra ads and/or toolbars, and may do things like change your homepage, redirect your search queries, and/or spy on your internet usage.
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