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.