Are Your Internet Accounts Secure?
When you are doing business on the internet, you’ll need to have accounts in various internet web sites. How certain are you that these accounts of yours are secure from prying eyes? Surely you would want to ensure that your accounts in perhaps PayPal, ClickBank, Adsense, Adwords, etc are safe and sound from any mischievous access. These are the accounts with your financial details. Keeping them safe from unwanted access is tantamount. You stand a chance of losing your internet income should their security be compromised.
The question is - “How do you keep these accounts safe from the unwanteds?”
Recently, I received an email from the good people at Google Adwords. The mail refers to some attempts at getting Adwords users to disclose particulars of their Adwords account to a third party web site acting like the actual Adwords site. Such attempts are called phishing. Following is an excerpt from that particular mail.
At Google, we take the safety of our users very seriously, and we work hard to ensure that your accounts are secure. As part of those efforts, we recently compiled some tips on our blog to help protect you from “phishing,” which is an attempt to fraudulently collect passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-avoid-getting-hooked.html
This information is important because any online account can be targeted by phishers, including online advertising accounts.
There are reports of phishing attempts that falsely appear to be from adwords-noreply@google.com. These fraudulent emails ask users to update their billing information, take action on a disapproved ad, edit their account, or accept new AdWords terms and conditions. Please remember that Google’s AdWords team will never send an unsolicited message asking for your password or other sensitive information by email or through a link.
If you need to change your account information, such as your billing details or your password, always sign in to your AdWords account from the main AdWords login page at https://adwords.google.com and make the changes directly within your account.
As can be seen from the excerpt above, Google is well aware of these attempts by unscrupulous people to get unsuspecting users to disclose their account details via phishing sites.
Surely, there must be a way to prevent such things from happening. Of course there is. It really is not hard to keep your computer and internet accounts safe. All it takes is discipline on your side.
A full disclosure on keeping your computers and internet access secure is in the works right now. It should be ready for public access in a couple of days. In the mean time, following is a few tips on preventing you from being a phishing site victim - courtesy of Google Adwords. Read through it once. Think about it. Then read it once again. After which you should then read it again. Read it five times or more. This is to ensure that it sticks in your mind and become second nature to you. Better yet, read it five times for three days. Only then will it be engraved into your brains
Tips on how to avoid phishing:
- Don’t reply to or click on links in emails that ask for personal, financial, or account information.
- Check the message headers. The From: address and the Return-path should reference the same source.
- Instead of clicking the links in emails, go to the websites directly by typing the web address into your browser, cut and paste or use bookmarks.
- If on a secure page, look for “https” at the begging of the URL and the padlock icon in the browser.
- Keep your computer’s antivirus, spyware, browser, and security patches up to date and regularly run system scans.
- Review your accounts regularly and check for unauthorized activity.
- Use a browser that has a phishing filter (Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera).
The Security Basics page of the Starting Up Series is still in the works. Once it is done, you will be able to learn more about securing your computer and the internet access. Security should never be taken lightly in your venture into Internet Business. As such, it is the first topic to be mentioned in the Starting Up Series.
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