In quite an uncharacteristic fashion, I decided last week to deviate from my regular banter to talk about keeping safe online, a subject which is very important to everyone who uses the internet, yes I mean you reading this right now!
I remember when there was a sudden spate of people’s email accounts getting hacked into. Identities were stolen, personal details of one’s acquaintances were also compromised and in many cases, fraud was committed with this information. And then we heard of the concept of social engineering. Criminals and good ol’ weirdos would stalk a person online, gaining access to information about them from their online profiles on social networks because their privacy settings were loosely set or by profile hopping from secondary level friends or acquaintances whose privacy setting were gapping. These weirdos would then use the information they gleaned to groom their victims for one nefarious purpose or the other.
And so back to our big question from last week: cross account sign-in, is it that much of a blessing?
Well the answer is a rather dodgy yes and no. In fact, every benefit like a two edged sword has its own caveats. Take for instance the fact that you no longer have to remember different usernames and passwords in order to access different website and web resources. This is good but it also means that the potential hacker also only has to compromise one account to gain access to your entire life and he doesn’t need to remember usernames and passwords. Also, your account information is only as secure as the platform where you have elected to host your real account and with the recent myriad of corporate system compromise by hackers, who knows which of these platforms will be next. So am I saying you should not link your social network and other accounts – NO. Am I saying that these providers are not secure – no. Am I saying you should stay locked away in a prehistoric cave because hackers prowl the internet – most definitely not!
So how do you make the best of these new technologies and still keep yourself reasonably sae online, well here are a few steps you can take
• Uncheck remember me: many of us would like never to enter our username and password again and so we check the ‘remember me’ or ‘keep me signed in’ button every time we sign into our accounts. Although some may think that this is safe on your own computer, but you will find that if you form the habit of checking that box, or leaving it checked, you will find yourself doing the same on public or unsafe computers and that’s like leaving home with your front door wide open
• Log out when you finish: Yes it means you will have to go through the mortifying pain of logging in again when you come back, but it definitely beats the inconvenience of your account being compromised.
• Log out from the host account: as a follow up to the previous point, it’s often best to logout from the main account (e.g. if you log into other sites through facebook, always sign out from facebook). This would normally log you out of other websites which use your facebook login.
• Get a good antivirus/spyware program: the importance of this cannot be overstated. Some people’s personal computers and even some public computers are a Pandora’s box of malicious programs waiting to be opened. It doesn’t have to cost u an arm and a leg, there are tonnes of free ones which are sufficient as long as you keep them updated.
• Avoid writing your login details on loose papers: for heaven’s sake if you have just one set of login details, it’s not too much to ask that you actually remember it.
• Do send your login details to someone else via email. Emails are hardly the best way to secure information and their contents can usually be sniffed easily on a wireless network. Also, if your email account is ever hacked, any lingering login credentials in your sent items, inbox or deleted items folder will be at the mercy of the hacker.
• Double check: double check everything, form the habit of taking time to ensure that you have done every thing right aand logged out, ended all sessions and closed all windows when you are leaving your computer.
This is by no means an exhaustive list but I hope it will be of immense help to everyone as we all try to keep safe online.
Browse Safely!

This week, I have decided to take a break from the regular chatter and discuss something somewhat serious. For those of you who do not know, one of the elements of my Masters course in Edge Hill University is Information Security and a pervasive part of that field is Internet security. Nowadays, people rely so much on the internet in order to run their daily lives. One way or another, we all make use of the internet, hell I’ve seen a couple of toddler profiles on facebook.

Matter of fact is, if you are reading this blog, you too are an internet user, what differs is how each individual uses the internet, but then again, this distinction seems to get thinner and thinner with each passing day. Almost every internet users use email! Whether yahoo, MSN, gmail etc, we’ve all got one somewhere. And then there is the social network phenomenon: facebook, twitter, linkedin etc. And then we have the ubiquitous blog, website, forum where a lot of people find answers to their problems, avenues to let themselves loose and a platform to showcase themselves. And then there are times when we really can’t distinguish between our social network platform and our email provider (facebook email and google buzz!!! :-/ )

In the past, we had to maintain a user name and password for all of our online accounts, and so we might have as well been a different person in every different online environment. Different sites had different authentication and security requirements and we had to battle with remembering user names and password combinations. And then someone though of using email addresses as usernames and it was the fad for a while.

Enter Web 2.0, social platforms and open authentication and the dynamics of user registration evolved dramatically. Not only did we not have to use a different username and password but in many cases we didn’t even have to fill a form to register anymore or sign in to get access to our profiles across different independent sites. It seemed like life couldn’t get any better. And then recently, we began to see cross email platform registration. The ability to sign into your email using your facebook login, accessing your yahoo email using your gmail login. It seems too good to be true, right? Before you answer lets backtrack a bit.

Read part 2 of Keeping Safe online for the answer to that question, the caveats to be careful for and how to keep yourself and your friends safe online.