How To Send Password Protected Documents Via Email

Follow @ryderskull88

Matters of privacy and online safety have been progressively tossed around in the media in recent years. More and more people fear that their privacy is constantly being invaded and that their emails are being read. Whether that is true or not, I can't really say. For those of you who believe this is the case and you want to send sensitive data via email, I can teach you how you can protect it. Using passwords is a very basic cryptic method, but it ensures that only you and the party you're sending the message to can read it (provided they have the password). 

How to Prevent Yourself from Becoming A Victim of Identity Theft

Twelve million Americans become a victim of identity theft each year. Fortunately, you do not have to be one of them. You should never use a public Wi-Fi network to make a financial transaction. A hacker could very easily access your username, password and account number if you use a public Wi-Fi network.

You also want to make sure that you avoid posting a picture of your debit or credit card online. That might seem like a given, but it is something that many people do anyway. If you post a picture of your credit or debit card, then you are asking for someone to steal the number off of it.

When you are setting passwords, you should make them long. You should also make sure that you use several different characters and avoid using a password that people could very easily figure out, such as 1234567. Additionally, you should make sure that you change your password often.

Source: The Stupidest Things You're Doing to Put Your Identity at Risk

Source: The Stupidest Things You're Doing to Put Your Identity at Risk

Do You Choose the Free VPN Service or Paid For VPN?

Follow @ryderskull88

Many have been asking whether or not they should choose a paid VPN or free VPN services for their portable devices.  This is a question that many will debate over so let’s just keep things simple.  First of all, if you’re on a tight budget or just unsure about VPN, you should try out a free version.

Using the free options will give you time to see how VPN works and whether that particular service will offer you the best service.  However, if you find you don’t like the services you get with the free option, there is always paid companies. 

With the paid services, it’s more than likely that you will get a little more for than money than what you would get with free.  You might also find that the free trial helps you to make up your mind about free or paying VPN.

Both free and paid VPN services can work excellent for web users.  You will have to think very carefully as to whether your budget can add virtual private network services or not.  If not, don’t worry, there are many good free options out there but if you want all honesty, the paid services are always the best. 

They offer value for money and just an easier feeling in knowing where your money is going.  That is not to say free is no good but you really do want to feel at ease when using the paying services.

The Best VPN Service to Choose

There are many good services out there for VPN today but it will all depend over what you are particularly looking for.  For example, you might want to choose a company that is well trusted and known such as Hide My Ass, however, they might not give you the specifications that you are looking for.  You might not want to choose a service that is over ten dollars a month either, but the choice is yours. 

This is why it’ll be important to search and not just look at one or two sites.  You have to know who is out there and who you can trust; and it might take a little longer than what you hoped for while searching.  However, it will be the best option for you to find the best VPN providers.  There are many of them out there such as Pure VPN, Ghost VPN, Cyber and many more so it will be vital that you take the time to see what is out there and really know what’s best for you. 

Of course, if you don’t like any of the paying virtual private network options, you don’t need to chose them.  You can freely choose one that offers a free test run or trial, this way you don’t waste more money than you really need to.  It’s entirely up to you but for your portable devices, you need to think what is best to protect you.

Mike writes about VPN. you may Check out his latest post about best VPN.

-->

Related articles

• Best VPN Service Provider? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]
• Conversation on Multi-Tenancy in VPNs, Part 1
• Hideman is a free VPN service with mutliple server locations
• Kepard - A fast VPN service

Ways on How to Make your Computer Secure while Online.

Securing your computer while online seriously isn’t as difficult as it looks provided that you educate yourself to the dangers that is in existence or ever presence on the internet. Also make use of your good common sense like do not go to site that is known to have been a source of malware and the likes. In this post I shall be focusing on eight ways that you can do to make your computer secure while online can be compromised and some common sense approaches you can use to avoid this from taking place.

Many individuals get freaked out when you mention the expression “computer internet security”. They immediately leap to the assumption that it can only be done by somebody well-versed in computer expertise or you need to pay out big money on computer Internet security software. This is not true because even ordinary people can make their computer secure while online. This fear is completely unfounded and in fact there are numerous simple, common sense things that anyone, with even a tiny grasp of computers, can do to help preserve their computer security from dangers pose by using the internet.

1. Make use of well designed passwords. I have a post about this; never use your own name, birthday, street address or other personal information as a password. Anyone who knows you or has access even to general details about you can easily figure these out. There are even tools used by expert computer hackers that will crack dictionary-generated passwords. The best password frequently consists of no less than eight characters, a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols all randomly selected. Although these kinds of passwords are difficult for you to remember, they’re offer much tougher lock for the hacker to crack as well. A way for you to remember these special passwords is to create an acronym utilizing each of the numbers, letters and symbols used. In addition there are software programs available that will randomly create passwords for you. The key thing is you have to discover one way to remember them whether doing it manually yourself or having a program do it automatically.

Image via Wikipedia

2. Change your password regularly or at least maintain a routine of keeping your password new. It all depends on you for how long, it makes be one month or longer before you change or alter your password. Regrettably this straightforward step is what gets many computer users into trouble. They utilize the same password year after year and sooner or later someone is going to gain access to it, either unintentionally or on purpose. Especially if an individual has needed to provide the password to other people to allow access to their computer for a specific program or account.

3. Be a Wise E-mail User. E-mailing continues to become one of the most utilized strategies by people implicated in Internet crimes to gain accessibility to a computer through spyware and other types of malware, or just for spreading computer viruses through the internet community. On no occasion for you to open e-mail attachments or click on links within e-mails from mysterious senders as they could either install unsafe programs onto your computer or send you to inappropriate internet sites. Never deliberately provide information to e-mails from somebody you don’t recognize, actually it is safer not to even to respond or forward them. Just tap the delete button. Be very wise and careful about these things from an email where the sender in not known to you.

4. Install an effective, trustworthy computer security software program on your computer and make sure that you keep it current by downloading any updates for the data security files. Always look to find out that the software application has this updating feature. Besides the security software, also make sure that your computer firewall, that is part of the operating system on your computer, is turned on. I also have a post in about firewall for ad deeper understanding. This stops unauthorized access to your computer from outsiders.

Image via Wikipedia

5. Another programs that can be used to deliver harmful package is the Instant Messenger. It is a cool way of getting instant chat, but files received via Instant Messenger may by-pass your computer security scanning feature, so it’s best never to open any files received this way. Some of my friends who use IM for chatting has been a victim of virus attack delivered thru the instant messenger system. By clicking on a file to open it, activates the virus that can infect you computer.

6. Watch out for pop-ups. Many online companies use what are called “pop-ups” which are small windows containing advertisements that come into view when you are visiting a webpage. Frequently hackers will position links on these pop-ups that if clicked will begin the process of infecting your computer with a malicious program of some sort, be it spyware, adware, or some type of virus. To be safe, never click on any links that occur in these advertising windows. Nearly all computer operating systems now contain settings to block these types of annoying advertisements.

Image via Wikipedia

7. Downloading “Free” Stuff. The FREE STUFF is one of the most enticing things on the internet. This should be a “no brainer” however lots of people still do this- downloading files, programs, applications and online tools from unknown web sites. There’s an incredible collection of great FREE products available online as shareware and test offers, nevertheless it is up to you to ensure the place you are getting the products from is a reputable source. When in doubt, often a quick search making use of a search engine such as Google, it can reveal if the website is being reported as being a rip-off site or not based on the experiences of others. If you are still apprehensive, then it’s best not to download from the internet site in question and search for another source.

8. Carry out a regular house-cleaning of your computer. Remove any programs, tools or applications that you simply no longer make use of as these not only will decelerate your computer, but in some cases may provide a gateway for malware to enter your computer system from an outside source. Also perform a regular virus scan to make sure that nothing is left out.

Having a poorly protected computer is just a catastrophe waiting to happen. Not only do you run the risk of having private and confidential information stolen and used to steal your money or even your identity, but it as well supplies a weapon for the hacker to make use of to gain access to other people’s computers also if they gain control of your e-mail address book.

By following the common sense tips above will definitely enhance your ability to protect your computer, yourself, and your loved ones from being victims of cyber-crimes. Still at the end of the day, you’ll need to think about the acquisition of an effective computer security software program as mentioned, if you do not have this already, to get the amount of protection necessary to prevent the more serious internet risks.

How to Have the Best Computer Passwords

In today age of inter connectivity where almost everything can be stored and access via the internet, one important aspect of storing our things behind lock and keys is the PASSWORD. Yup the old fashion lock and key has a digital equivalent called the PASSWORD. The PASSWORD is one of the most important aspect of security for keeping safe our files. We often used them in our computer so we lock the computer itself or put a password on the account that we used to log-in into our computer.

No sane person would ever like somebody else reading her email, or logging into their computer and swiping their allegedly secure search engine optimization information. Or for what it's worth some other person using her password and breaking into a monetary institution. You should, choose a powerful, secure password in such a manner that will be a hard nut to crack for others and easy for you to recollect. The more random and mixed-up you make it, the harder it is for others to break. Mind you, if your password is compromised, the password crackers will even take over your identity.

The password that we use to access all our account can be the same or every bit different from each account. If we use different password in all of our account then we need to write down or use a password manager. A password, if too short, is vulnerable to attack if an attacker gets hold of the cryptographic hash of the password. Present-day PCs are fast enough to try all alphabetic passwords shorter than 7 characters. We will be able to call a password puny if it is short or is a default, or which can sometimes be rapidly guessed by searching a subset of all possible passwords such as words in the compendium, correct names, words based totally on the user name or common variations on these themes.

On the other hand, a robust password would be sufficiently long, random, or which can be produced only by the user who chose it, so that ‘guessing ‘ for it will require too long a time.

For maximum security, the user should follow some simple guidelines:

1) Passwords should preferably be at least 8 characters long and not more than 14.

2) Passwords should contain a mix of numbers, letters, and special characters (%&3ac_ht4m7).

3) Passwords shouldn't contain a compendium word from any compendium, be it French, Spanish, medical, etc.

4) Each password should be different from the user’s User-ID and any permutation of that User-ID.

5) New passwords and old passwords should differ by at least 3 characters.

6) Avoid picking names or nicknames of folk, pets, or places, or personal info that may be simply found out,eg your birthday, address etc.

7) It’s sensible to stay away from common keyboard sequences,eg dfgh678 or abc345.

8) Never form a password by appending a digit to a word. That can be simply guessed.

9) Avoid writing your password down or storing it on your PC.

10) Never share your password with any other person.

Making sure that our password is safe and is hard to guess is just one of the many ways of keeping our digital information safe. We must also be very careful in using our computer in public places  or using public computers, because we never know what who or what kind of application is watching us input those very sacred alpha numeric combination. We must always be vigilant in everything that we do whenever we are logging in into our account wherever we may be.

Computer 101: Google 2-Step Authentication for All your Google Accounts.

Everyone that have internet access or uses that internet regularly for gaming, research, business and many more have an email account, this email account can be a corporate or an organization based or the paid email accounts from different providers and the most common of all the free email account which is available everywhere in the internet. One such provider of free email accounts is Google.com which is a very big internet based company. They have a free email account service called the G MAIL or Google Mail, aside from that they also have a lot of free services being offered like blogger.com for creating your own personal blog in the internet. All this free account is link within the Google system, if you lo-gin to one account then you can access another by configuring a few option without typing a username and password again and again. This setup is very useful if you’re going to jump from one account to another within Google.

Now how do we use our email account? Well we use it for personal communication and transaction over the internet, some sensitive information has also been stored in our email. Now is this free email account really secure? Well yes they are secure because if not, in the first place no one will use them if they are not secure. The first level of security for these email services is the password. Yup that all important passwords, the things that we always keep forgetting is not used frequently or we have already to many password to memorize. Also the user name we used in combination with the all important password, the more complex the password the more secure it or the longer the password the more secure it also. Now nobody can access your accounts if they not know the username and password. But wait what if those two important information has been stolen form you? You say what, how they got my information?

Image via Wikipedia

Well every heard of the term hacking and Phishing? Simply put it, theses terms means to get or acquire in this case sensitive personal information from one account. There are many ways on how to implement this technique. One is using software another is using link from email send to your email accounts from some one you though you know. Please click the link to see a more details and historical explanation for Phishing and for hacking. To cut it short, rather that securing your email account with just the username and password why not use another layer of security. Well this is where the Google 2-step authentication process comes in for all Google accounts users. This process although will take longer to access your G mail account is very important in keeping your account safe. It will add another layer of security. When we log-in to our email account the first thing that we do is we put the username and the password then we wait for the contents to display on our screen.

But with added feature security the second step for verification or authentication is it will send a code to your very own personal phone, via text or voice call. And you will encode the code on the box provided to verify that you’re the real owner of that account. After verifying the code is correct it will proceed in displaying the content of your G mail account. Also there is an option on the verification process that the computer that you are using can be remembered for 30 days. This feature allows the user to enter the verification only once within 30 days for the same computer. This is very helpful if you are using your own laptop or PC we don’t have to type in that code every time we log-in to our G mail account. This second layer of protection is also very handy while we access our G mail accounts from public computers.

Now the next questions are how do we activate this G mail verification process? To activate the process on your G mail account please click the link provided, it is the official blog for Google Email protection.  For other email service pleas check if they provide for free accounts.