Safe Computing Practices

The first part of this article on safe computing is setting up and maintaining a safe environment. Now we move on to the second part which has to do with safe computing practices. How does good practices or habits contribute to safer computing? Let's take a look:

We all know that email is a great communication tool. Everyone who uses the computer and the Internet is bound to use email communication. And partly because of that, email has also become a popular mode of attack by virus creators, scam artists, and trojans and spyware programmers. Daily we get bombarded by this influx of 'junk' mail, of which many are infested with viruses and spywares. The first rule of safe email practice is never open an unsolicited attachments in emails. Even if it comes from people you know. Lots of viruses are transmitted nowadays via file attachments. You should keep the followings in mind:

• Avoid opening unsolicited attachments
  Especially files attachment with the following extension types - ".vbs," ".scr," ".exe," or ".pif" file extensions. Files that end in these extensions are most likely to contain some sort of virus. One common trick of virus writers is to hide the virus in an attachment that, when run, produces a clever or entertaining animation on the screen, that makes people forward on to all their friends without thinking. The bottom line is if you get an email attachment, unless you feel very confident about what it is, where it came from, and why it was sent to you - DON'T OPEN IT! If you really feel the need to, scan it first with your anti-virus software to see if anything is lurking inside. (You better make sure that you have the latest virus signatures). I would not hesitate to advocate the practice of immediately deleting emails with attachment from unknown sources.


• What you read is not really what you click...
  Plenty of bad things transmit themselves just by convincing users to visit malicious Web sites. Therefore be wise about clicking links in emails from unknown origin. What you read as the link (URL) displayed in the email isn't really where it will bring you. The real link is hidden and will take you to a different location than you thought. With a little practice, you will be able to spot those real hidden links. The safest practice is not to click the links at all. In fact just delete those kinds of emails.


• Never trust emails of this nature...
  Just about every week we get numerous warning emails from some banks, ebay, paypal, credit card companies that ask you to log in to your account to verify or confirm your account information. (The ironic thing is often we don't even have accounts with those institutions to begin with). Such emails, without fail, are scams out to trick you to surrender your private information. And if you did click the links in those emails, you will find a webpage that looks just like the real thing. But under the hood are lots of tell-tale signs that they are not. DO NOT log in at those web sites.


• Have an extra email address or two
  One of the unpleasant daily tasks of checking your email box is deleting junk spam mail. More than 50% of my daily incoming mail are junk mail these days. For this reason I recommend that you get a couple of extra free email addresses from one of those webmail services like gmail, yahoo mail, msn mail. The reason for this is you want to keep your personal email address private. That means using it only for private emailing of personal nature or confidential nature like your banks. Use the other spare email addresses when signing up for any website, forum or do online shopping. This will help to reduce junk mail to your private email box significantly. I wish it will eliminate junk mail altogether but it won't. At least reducing them would be a good start.