Leaving footprints online good or bad?

I think I’ll start off by asking if you have a myspace account (typical answer yes) this I find bad if you do not want to leave a footprint on the internet this is the place you do not want to leave one.

Let’s see who looks at your myspace pages, could your employers look in fact they do not they have found these places to be very truthful they will not look at your social sites like myspace, bebo and facebook. But a lot of the time you can actually use this to your advantage if you have completely crap qualifications you make these pages look like you know a thing or two you have a much better chance of getting in that your opponent that has posted pictures on their myspace from their drunken nights out, if you was employing someone which would you choose?

But the real question is what other ways could these be exploited and the actual fact is identity theft yeah these things are possible, so the issue is that if you are a member of many social sites leaving parts of your life on each like on one you have DOB the others locations maybe even a phone number. Even having these on different sites these can be linked together at the click of a button, but you might be wondering is how they would find these sites easily if you have an name then its easy. Now there are many ways to get around this like creating a fake name not completely legal but its better than using your real name if you are not the adventurous time then you can use a generator.

Securing your computer Typer Tappers style!

Considering 90% of users use Windows 9% Mac and 1% Linux I shall focus on Windows, now we all know how buggy Windows XP is just look at the security updates you get everyday, its silly.

Normally I tell people to download Linux like Ubuntu, Kubuntu or PCLinuxOS, but we all know it’s not easy to learn another operating system.

So I shall point out some key factors in securing your windows box stopping the occasional viruses.

So lets start with basic stuff your security applications, running Microsoft’s firewall disable it and download a better one, there are a lot out their for example sygate (before taken over by Symantec), not really recommended if you are a novice user.

Instead you want to be looking at a more user friendly firewall one I like is Comodo, gives you a lot of detail on what its doing and will alert you when applications try to access the internet.

Next Anti-virus programs, one of my most preached application is Avast on access scanner this will scan all incoming and outgoing traffic from emails to P2P files and even web pages, so if a malicious active x script runs in your browser Avast will stop it in its tracks so you don’t become infected.

Choosing You’re Password

Many of you might think that passwords don’t have to be very long like for example you might want to use your first name like john which should never be done, this can be easily broken into by co workers or even people that know you.

Choosing a password can be very easy but the main rule that you shouldn’t do is using anything that can be linked to you for example your own name or the name of people in your family these will be broken into.

A correct password should contain something like 3 letters, 3 numbers and 3 symbol.

Here is a example of a password h5b&j4!5?, now personally I use about 5 different passwords that are like that I remember these by actualy putting a post it note on my laptop when I’ve learned it i will remove it.

If you want to use a generator to make your passwords you can use this from pctools.com but I prefer to make my own.

Temporary Email Forwarding

You might of read my previous post on temporary email addresses but now I’m going to post about a service called temporary email forwarding this allows you to change your email address when you feel like it but the unique factor about this is you can use your original account like gmail and you can have all your emails forwarded to that account for example you can be johnsmith@temporaryinbox.com and any emails will be forwarded to johnsmith@gmail.com.

If you start getting extreem spam you can then change it to something like johnsmith1@temporaryinbox.com and still have it forwarded to your gmail account.

I checked with the creator to see if the emails could still be checked online and he said that all the email would be sent to the private account so its secure enough.

If you hate spam this seems to be a good way of getting rid of it so check the website out http://www.temporaryinbox.com.

Blocking Websites

Today I’ll talk about blocking websites this is a simple method and very easy to add new websites.

First you need to find the host file, if you are running WinPatrol you can find it by going to the options tab and click “view host file” or if you don’t you can find it on windows XP and Vista in %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc you can just run this and it will bring up the directory.
A faster way to open it is copy this C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\etc\HOSTS and run it by going to start >> run.

Next you want to right click on the file “host” and open with notepad once this is open you can start blocking websites, so you want to block Google add this line at the bottom “127.0.0.1 google.com” you may need to add another with www. as it can be classed as another domain.

The reason i first point out using WinPatrol is because it can identify the exact location of the host file through the registry files, the file may not work because something malicious has changed the root of the host file so that it can redirect things like bank sites to other sites which are malicious WinPatrol will monitor this file for any changes as well so if you haven’t changed it, it will point out that something has changed it.