There are millions of online destinations today and every interest found in modern society has a place somewhere online. In the last 8 years alone the booming online economy has pushed businesses and entrepreneurs to open up shops online and this has also spawned hordes of aspiring entrepreneurs and copycats that simply overlook privacy and security when it comes to doing transactions online or collecting user information.

Online security isn’t necessarily taken seriously by everyone, there are users who do not bother to use online security software like firewalls, anti virus and anti spyware software. All of which are necessary to protect your system from intrusion and by extension your personal information. Identity theft occurs easily online because opportunities are never lacking for identity thieves. People are habitually careless about their information and no one ever really believes that identity theft can happen to them until it is too late.

Protecting your computer system from spyware

One of the most immediate dangers online and still an effective method used in identity theft today is through the use of spyware software. Spyware programs are small, quiescent pieces of code that work as background processes to collect user information as the user types and surfs the internet. Most spyware programs are designed to work with internet browsers since this is where users are likely to input credit card or banking information while shopping or paying bills online.

Online criminals are very savvy and are constantly updating their software and improving their methods to be more stealth and swift about executing a successful capture of your information. All online users should take the personal initiative to keep spyware off of their systems by employing the appropriate anti-spyware software and keeping it properly updated.

Updating your computer’s Operating System

Although there is more interest today in other platforms besides windows like Linux and MAC OS, 90% of computer systems that connect to the internet today are windows based PCs. Their inherent lack of appropriate native security makes these systems very easy to compromise by knowledgeable hackers and identity thieves.

Fortunately Microsoft does work hard to distribute security and OS patch updates to its systems on a regular basis. Keeping up with these updates will ensure that any security holes on your systems OS are properly patched. Having these vulnerabilities present is just another entry point that can be exploited with a computer virus or spyware. Most windows systems come configured with an automatic update tool that downloads and patches your system, do not disable this tool, it will do the footwork for you.

Using safe browsers to protect yourself

Antivirus experts like Symantec have said before that there’s no such thing as a safe browser, however some are worse than others. If you are still using Internet Explorer 6 or below, you’re wrong and you need to fix yourself. Internet Explorer has a long history of security holes which have been fixed for the most part in version 7. Even though Internet Explorer has undergone a major overhaul with an emphasis on security, it still has issues that can be overcome by using other browsers. Namely Firefox and Opera for PC systems. These two browsers have a much leaner user base, but do offer better security features than IE7.

Firefox and Opera have strong communities of developers who constantly contribute to security and usability of these browsers. Again, these browsers are known to be safer than Internet Explorer, however they’re not 100% safe, you can still be at risk if you frequent malicious sites that can execute code on your system the moment you load a page. So it’s important to also keep these browsers updated.

Keeping your information private

Obviously you never want to share your passwords with anyone online, you should also not ever volunteer personal information on chat rooms, via email, on social media sites or input this information on an online form unless the site is legitimate and secure. You can often tell if the site you’re inputting information on is secure if the lock icon appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser or the address bar itself.

Keeping your information private also means being able to differentiate between a phishing scam and a legitimate source. Phishing scams typically occur via email, where you may be contacted by what appears to be a financial institution or an online source with whom you do business. The trick is for you to follow the links they send you and input your account information. No legitimate institution or company will ever ask you for this information via email, so ignore and delete these emails, which are almost always in your spam folder.

Stay away from sites where pirated software is freely distributed

It’s awfully tempting to get free software especially when it is a popular application that costs a lot of money. The main problem with these applications is that they’re almost never safe to use. The moment you install them on your system, you could be infecting your computer with viruses and spyware. Again, these small programs are very quiet and you won’t know they’re actually installing.

Sites that distribute free software are typically hosted under foreign domain extensions and they often move a lot to avoid being shutdown. So please consider this carefully when you find yourself with the opportunity to acquire free software.