The internet can be a scary place, we have all heard about fraudsters, criminals and hackers using the internet for illegal financial gain or cyber vandalism. Most of the problems are the responsibility of the ISP or server admin/IT Department to combat or prepare for, however even the simple web site or email user needs to take into account basic rules in order to ensure they are not the victim or cause of a security breech.

The first thing to be aware of is that email is not secure. Although not common, it is possible for someone to read an email you send to another person. Always ensure you do not include any information which could be of use to someone who wants to gain financially from reading your mail. Do not include login details unless you know who is requesting them and never send credit card or bank details over email. If you do have to send a password via email change it as soon as you are able. Almost all emails are not intercepted by hackers, but the technology for email is fairly simplistic and does not have much inbuilt security, so bare this in mind when communicating with others.

Always keep your passwords and usernames secure and do not use ones which are easy to guess. It is becoming more common for web service providers and sites to require your passwords contain upper case letters, lower case letters and numbers or symbols. This makes it a lot harder to guess. There are around 300,000 commonly used words in the English language. However an 8 character password containing symbols can have a possible 128,063,081,718,016 combinations making it almost impossible to ever guess or “brute force”.

Finally, be careful what sites you go to on the internet, many can have programs on them or applications that can infect your computer with spyware or worse. Always ensure you use the latest browser with the latest updates and ensure you use a modern operating system with the latest updates and a firewall and spyware detector.