Cyber Monday holiday shoppers beware -- scammers can be lurking with bogus websites and fake emails to separate you from your money or even your identity.
large number of people expected to shop online Monday presents thieves with a golden opportunity to bilk unsuspecting consumers. If you're planning on letting your fingers do the shopping, here are five tips to help you stay safe. Don't Click Email Links
Following links from phony emails is one of the oldest methods for perpetrating any online scam. So don't be fooled by messages in your inbox offering enticing sales at known sites and then clicking away only to land on a scam site. Instead, open up your Web browser and enter the URL to the site offering the discounts you're looking for and do a search for the items yourself. If you can't find the amazing deal from the email, it’s probably a scam, says Ron Meyran, director, security product marketing for security firm Radware. http://www.pcworld.com/article/244983/5_tips_to_shop_safe_on_cyber_monday.html
Also, if your ISP has a spam filter offering, use it ... nowadays, spam filters are pretty good and false positives rarely happen. It's best if your e-mail account has a separate spam folder. Then you can look carefully what's in there. Also, if you detect a spam e-mail in your regular folder, and you move it to the spam folder, it automatically gets registered as spam, which will have an effect on future e-mail delivered to you or other people. The same thing applies when you move a false positive out of the spam folder into the regular folder.
To prevent intrusions via security defects in your mail program, there are several ways:
If you absolutely have to use Microsoft Windows, make sure it's a legit copy by looking for the license sticker on your computer and on the package that included the installation or recovery media. See Microsoft's "How to Tell" site for more information on how to check whether your copy of Windows is genuine. If your copy of Windows is genuine, you can use the Windows Update function from the Start menu to update your Windows installation to the latest version, incl. security patches and bug fixes. On some machines, Windows Update might install the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) utility to check if the version of Windows is genuine, and lock down Windows and bring up a purchase offer otherwise.
Check if your mail program and web browser are secure. Avoid using Microsoft's default offerings (like Windows Mail or Internet Explorer), since they're prime attack targets for criminals. There's a multitude of free open-source alternatives, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera and Chrome (FOSS version is called Chromium ).
You can use the free Oracle VirtualBox to set up a virtual machine on your computer (if you have a regular desktop PC and enough system throughput). In the virtual machine, you can install a secure OS like Linux (see DistroWatch for a list of distros, favorites are Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian ), or FreeBSD. In the emulated machine, you can surf the web and read your e-mail much more safely than with Microsoft Windows.
You can install Linux natively as an addition to Windows and boot into it for web surfing and mail reading (with FreeBSD, be careful, b/c last time I checked, it didn't support GPT partition tables, which are used for large hard drives). If you have Apple hardware, Apple's MacOS X is also much more secure than Windows; however, there have been many exploits in the past years that Apple seems or seemed to be reluctant to fix (search on Slashdot for Apple threads).
You can replace Microsoft Windows (or MacOS X) with Linux. With some additions, like Fluendo's software and codec packs (which provides licenses for patented technologies), it is fully multimedia capable, and can serve as a full replacement to Microsoft Windows (or MacOS X), depending on what you're doing with it.
