Abine

With great convenience, and virtually fathomless access to information, entertainment, and ecommerce, comes great risks. That’s the trade-off that all of us make when we use the internet. It’s a significantly greater risk when we use the internet for email and any kind of ecommerce. Doing so opens us up to attempted hacks, identity thieving scams, viruses, malware, spyware, scareware, pharming, and a variety of other criminal schemes. Among the most common and one of the most dangerous schemes is “phishing.” For the uninitiated, phishing is an email-based scam in which a cyber-criminal (or group of them) send emails purported to be legitimate, from legitimate businesses or friends, that actually contain malicious links or attachments. The point of phishing is to extract private, personal information, and eventually money, from the unsuspecting victim. If there’s anything encouraging about phishing, however, it’s that the people threatened by phishing scams have recou...

While it’s a fantastic understatement to point out that the internet has changed the world of commerce, sometimes the differences between ecommerce and good old brick-and-mortar trade are overstated. For instance, the reputation of a business, online or on the street, is incredibly important in determining a company’s success or failure. The difference is, before the internet, the reputation of any business but one famous or infamous enough to be discussed in the local or national media was virtually 100% attributable to word of mouth. That’s not the case with the internet. It’s an understandable dynamic and perhaps a fair trade-off: a merchant, from the comfort of their living room, now has access to literally hundreds of millions of customers all over the planet. For better or worse, however, those hundreds of millions of customers have access to that merchant—and that merchant’s online reputation. As hard as it can be to remove personal information from Google , i...

The issue of internet privacy and security is increasingly shifting from a fingers-crossed “it won’t happen to me” dynamic to one in which virtually everyone has either had their identity stolen, their information exposed in a massive hack, or knows someone who has. In light of this, people are getting better about not having predictable passwords and being sure only to give payment information to secure sites and the like. Unfortunately, there are a number of ways in which internet use can leave anyone vulnerable to hacks and information exposure. Do you have a social media account that you use or, perhaps more importantly, that you don’t? Do you know how to remove personal information from Google ? How familiar are you with your workplace’s privacy policy? Getting the answers and solutions to these questions (at least) could save you a whole lot of grief. Online Profiles You’ve Stopped Using There’s no other entity that inspires billions of people to willingly ...