Internet Safety

If you are an avid user of the internet, you have probably heard stories about people who have experienced identity theft when making online purchases. Making purchases online, especially financial ones like loans or mortgages can be stressful. Even though the threat of identity theft exists, it is unlikely that identity theft will happen to you.

Most companies with an online application or store know that identity theft is possible. They have worked hard to make their websites as secure as possible with encryption, passwords, logins, and multiple security pred . It is in their best interest to pay close attention to security so that they do not have to face a lawsuit if something were to happen.

One way that companies ensure security is by hiring some of the best hackers in the world. These hackers, known as white hat hackers, constantly try to break into websites. By doing this, they reveal security weaknesses to the company so that the company can fix the problems and prevent hackers from successfully breaking in in the future.

Something you can do to reduce your stress level when making purchases online is to create passwords that appear meaningless to everyone except you. One way to do this is to take a sentence or line from one of your favorite movies and use the first letter of each word. So, for example, if your favorite movie is "The Princess Bride" and you love the quote, "you killed my father. Prepare to die", take out the first letter of each word to create your password. "YKMFPTD" would be your new password.

This password looks meaningless to most people, so it would be hard to guess. But to you, it makes perfect sense. You should also include capital and lower-case letters in your password, along with numbers. The password, "YkMfPtD2323" is an extremely secure password that would be very difficult to guess, but is easy to remember.

Another method is to always answer security questions with an answer that is unrelated to the question. In order to remember it, you could use the same answer every time. For example, if you love the "Star Wars" movies, you could always answer security questions with "death star". So, when security questions ask, "what is the name of your first grade teacher?" you answer "death star". The same goes for other questions, such as "what is your mother`s maiden name?"("death star") and "what was the name of your childhood pet?" ("death star"). This will be extremely difficult for others to guess, but you will never forget it.

You could also always use a credit card with a low limit to make online purchases. Credit card companies usually have great policies regarding unauthorized purchases and identity theft. There are also many different middleman companies that you can log into to make purchases so that you never have to enter in your credit card number.

So, next time you are using the internet to apply for a mortgage <a href="http://www.klcsloanteam.com/mortgageapplication/">mortgages</a>, check your bank account, or make purchases, just relax. As long as you are careful and try to protect your information, the internet is a safe place.