Preventing Leaks of Your Sensitive Information

There have been numerous articles in the news about identity theft. It can ruin your life for a long period. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have an abundant amount of information about you and your personal life. It has your birthday, your city and state, your friends and family names. It is very easy for a hacker to put it all together and get into your credit profile. He can then make it his own and your life becomes miserable as you try to convince your creditors that you did not make that charge, take out that loan or open that account.

It is not just the social networking sites that hackers look to steal your identity and credit; the gaming sites are another place they turn. If you do not have a good firewall, while you are sitting playing a game of spades with someone online, your personal information in your computer can easily be stolen by a hacker. Some people do not secure their network at all. These same people keep all their account information, passwords, bank balances and personal information including mother's maiden name in their computer unprotected for filling in forms easier. Most people use easy to remember questions and answers on sites as a secret question. Where you were born, your pet's name, what high school you attended. Some of this information sounds familiar when you think of your MySpace page, does it not?

You need to be careful when you give out information. Your friends posting happy birthdays, or other occasion messages gives information to a hacker. You need to set your profile to private. You can limit access to your MySpace Page to people in your contact list or to just your top 15 friends. You need to secure your personal information in an encrypted file if you insist on keeping it in your computer. Actually, this is something that you should not even have on your computer unless you know how to secure it completely.

At work, there are also the sensitive materials that you may not want your competitors to have. It could be the secret ingredient in a product, how you plan to implement a new product when you are releasing the improved product that your competitor has. Maybe your company is planning a hostile take-over of another company and any word of it leaking out would ruin the whole thing. Maybe you are spying on your competitor and you do not want him to know you have been there. In this case, you would want to make sure you use an anonymous proxy server so the visit to their site is not traceable back to you or your company.

Make sure that your network administrator has your network totally secured and always check to make sure your anonymous proxy server is still a valid proxy server. Do not keep your sensitive personal information where other people may access it. Use unique questions for your secret question on secure sites and do not use the same old usual ones. Make sure, anytime you put your personal information on a site that the lock is in the address bar and click on it to see what secure method they use.