Tips to Stay Safe Online and Protect Your Privacy

Don’t reply to spam.
Ever get one of those strange, unexpected e-mails for real estate, weight loss, work-at-home or speculation opportunities? Your best bet is to delete those e-mails without opening them. Never reply to these e-mails, even to remove your name from their lists. Replying will alert the sender that your e-mail is a “live” e-mail attached to an actual person.

Secured Web sites only.
Before you purchase a product or service online with a credit card, make sure the connection is secure or encrypted. Look for a small lock icon on the Web site, or look at the URL address line; a secure connection will begin with https:// instead of http://.

Beware of public wireless sites.
Don’t send personal or confidential information when using public wireless connections in coffee shops and other public places. Fellow wireless users could potentially monitor your Internet usage from their laptops, only a few feet away.


Watch your cookies.
Cookies are tidbits of information that Web sites store on your computer. Some cookies are useful, such as those that store information about you so you don’t have to retype it every time you go to that site. Other cookies, though, can be used to track your motions through a Web site, the pages you visit or the links you click. Some companies keep this data to themselves – however, some companies sell this information to other marketers. You can monitor and edit the cookies on your computer through your browser.

Install anti-spyware.
Spyware is sneaky software that rides its way onto computers during the download of screensavers, games, music and other applications. Spyware sends information about what you're doing on the Internet to a third-party, usually to target you with pop-up ads. spyware removal will help block this threat.

Block Spyware Websites With Inoculate

Many spyware infections happen on particularly prepared websites. These websites might take advantage of web browser vulnerabilities or offer software and files for download that infect a computer system once they are executed on it. Web users have several protection mechanisms that they can use to protect their computer system from these spyware infections. Modern antivirus software usually comes with modules that blocks or warns a user whenever a website with questionable content is visited. Another option to protect a computer system against spyware infections is to install browser plugins like Web of Trust that classify websites and report a safety rating back to the user.

And then there are programs like Inoculate that use the hosts file of the operating system to block spyware websites from being opened by routing the address of the spyware removal to the local computer system (which means the website will not be displayed when the user tries to open it).

Inoculate is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that will add more than 14001 spyware websites to the Windows host file. These 14001 spyware websites are blocked from being accessed by users of the computer system. The software creates a backup of the current host file before it begins to add the spyware websites to it so that spyware attacks and spyware programs are automatically blocked.

It is possible to reset the Windows hosts file or restore a previously created backup. One slight disadvantage of this spyware blocking approach is that it is not possible to view the spyware websites before they are added to the hosts file. Another problem is that the program is not automatically updating the spyware list over the Internet which alternatives like Hostsman which offers four different block lists and auto updating. Hostsman on the other hand is not a portable software program.

Related Topic
Detect and Prevent Spyware Infection