Nov
28

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If the words “privacy”, “anonymity” and “security”, are not part of your Internet vocabulary, they should be.

While Online

Many people are under the impression that their Internet presence is secure and anonymous. Nothing could be further from the truth! It is relatively easy for others to determine your activities and even your identity:

  • your Internet connection leaves a fingerprint of sorts that becomes imprinted on all of your online activities. This fingerprint is your IP address.
  • browser web page requests (and your browser’s cookies), peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, e-mail headers, chat & instant messaging (IM) sessions and Usenet newsposts will normally all reveal your IP address in one way or another.
  • once someone has your IP address, they can easily target you for purposes that range from the alarming: launching hacking attempts against your computer – to the annoying: building a profile about you and your preferences that marketers and data miners can track and exploit.
  • you must be very careful about the information that you post to social networking sites and who you allow to see your posts.
  • email bugs and web bugs can be used to determine your IP address and then be cross-referenced to your specific email address or your online identities.
  • hackers are continually throwing malware and attempting phishing and spoofing attacks to determine your personal information and steal your bank account and credit card details.

Your Computer

Even after you go off-line, a number of risks – many of them hidden – can be a source of sensitive information that remains stored on your computer:

  • your web browser´s cache and history list reveal where you have been as well as when and what you have viewed and downloaded.
  • data and downloads can be recovered from your hard drive even after you empty your computer’s Recycle Bin.
  • Window´s system files, including paging/swap and hibernation files can leave much information behind.
  • your hard drive´s slack space and unused clusters also contain data you thought was deleted.
  • Window´s registry and directory entries, including ‘most-recently used’ (MRU) lists, may reveal file and folder names of downloads you thought were deleted, wiped, renamed or moved.
  • all the personal and sensitive information on your computer, including the hidden trace data described above, that is not protected by strong encryption is just a (physical) theft away from being used by hackers or sold on the black market.
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