Identity theft rates continue to increase at an alarming pace. You hear about it frequently on the news, but what can you do to protect yourself? The truth about security is that there is nothing that is 100% secure. It reminds me of the old wisdom that states "a lock only keeps out the honest man." A determined thief may be delayed by security systems and methods but he will eventually succeed. Time is on his side. I encourage you to read the rest of this article to learn more. Knowledge is the key to security.

Some ways to secure your information include:

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  • Do not store important information such as login IDás and passwords.
  • Use complex passwords
  • Don't write down your login ID's and passwords

How they steal your information

One method of stealing your personal information is through key loggers, which are programs and devices that record your keystrokes. This is typically a passive technique that waits for you to enter your information. The thief then replays your keystrokes to obtain your login ID, passwords, account numbers, etc.

Lately some new variations of key logging have come into the view. Rather than store information and periodically retrieve it, this new approach scans certain files on your computer and automatically transmits your personal information to the thief.

How to protect yourself and your information

A simple method of protect to yourself is to not store the information in the first place. The price of this approach is convenience. Websites and other programs are more than happy to store your login ID's, passwords, and credit card numbers to provide convenience.

One of the reasons that this convenience is necessary is that every website and program has different requirements for password complexity. We want passwords that are easy to remember while they want passwords that are complex to improve security. While one website might be happy with a combination of 5 letters and 1 number, another site might require all that plus at least one capital letter.

The easy way for you to deal with this is to pick a few complex passwords that accommodate most of the sites. Most sites accept passwords that include all of the following:

• 8 characters
• at least one number
• at least one upper case letter
• at least one punctuation character

Sounds complicated but it's really simpler than you might think. An example of a strong password is "St0pThi3f!", without the quotes. That's 10 characters, will work on almost every site, and is easy to remember.

Help your computer to protect you

One way to help your computer to protect you is to disable Internet Explorer's Auto-complete feature. This is a convenience feature that is enabled on many computers and key loggers take advantage of it. It stores information you have previously entered on website forms. The next time a form requests the same information, auto-complete fills it in for you. Follow these steps to disable auto-complete.

• Open Internet Explorer
• Click Tools on the menu
• Click Internet Options
• Click the Content tab
• Click the AutoComplete button
• Uncheck "Forms" and "User names and passwords on forms"
• Click the "Clear Forms" and "Clear Passwords" buttons
• Click Ok to close the AutoComplete Settings dialog
• Click Ok again to close the Internet Options dialog

Please check back regularly to read upcoming articles on other methods of securing your computer including firewalls, anti-virus, and spy-ware protection.