As we use internet everyday in our lives, here are some recommendations to have a safer internet usage.

1- Never give password someone you don’t know. Some spammers may send you pretentious emails asking you to verify your identity. Most companies don’t send such emails and you need to be careful where you submit your email address and password. Checking the correctness of the url may give you a hint whether the email is aimed to get your identify. If you accidentally submit your identity, contact immediately with the bank or email company to reset your password.

2- Don’t give important information in MSN or Chat. MSN and chat softwares can easily be hacked and your identity can’t be stolen easily. To prevent the identity theft, never give your social security number, password, or such critical information on MSN. Someone may steal those critical information and can cost you thousands of dollars to recover the potential damage.

3- Never send your pictures to a person in chat. Ideally, you can’t know whom you are chatting on the internet. Sending your personal files/pictures is not secure decision. The person who acquire your pictures can use those images to claim that he/she is you. The same rules applies to MySpace members. Having pictures publicly available on MySpace can give you a lot of potential damage. You can not know who is looking at your pictures.

4- Don’t send money overseas. Sending money overseas to claim a prize is not wise thing to do. After sending money, there is no return. You need to be careful whom you are dealing with. Ideally, if an opportunity looks like a life time opportunity, most probably it will appear as a scam later on. Ask for business title, tax number when you are dealing with people. Also, use credit card when you a big purchase instead of debit card. If something goes wrong, you can have a chance to get the money back with credit card while you can’t with debit card.

For more information for computer security and other practical knowledge on computers, you can visit CleanPC.org.

Holidays are one of the busiest times during  the year. While everyone tries to plan the travel arrangements, it is a popular time of the year for the viruses to spread easily. Especially Fourth of July has the highest computer risk because most people don’t like to update their anti-virus software because there are more fun things to outside.

When most people are in vacation, they would like to turn off their computers. When they get back, they tend to forget to update their anti-virus software. The computers that are not updated in a quite long time are in a serious risk. Therefore, it is highly recommended to update the anti-virus software before using the computer and scan the incoming emails before opening them.

Leaving the computer on is also not a good solution. It can create an excessive wear in mechanical circuits in the cooling fans and the hard drive motor. Frequently turning on and off the computer can also create problems in the motherboard circuits. These problems can be flexing and fatigue failure due to excessive temperature changes. It is a great practice to turn on the computer and turn it off at night or whenever you don’t use it. It is also highly recommended to clean inside the desktop to remove the dust that can create overheating in the system.

During the internet browsing, we are often exposed to pop-ups. These pop-ups can be dangerous and can lead us to a malicious website. Instead clicking the pop-ups, try close it by clicking X  mark on the upper right corner of the window. Some pop-ups can fool us by acting that they are cleaning or checking the spywares in our computer. They are often malicious and it is recommended not to click those pop-ups as well.

For better computer security and safe internet browsing, you can visit CleanPC.org for more information.