Secure Yourself
If you’re coming into this piece from Moolanomy, please check out some of my other pieces while you are here. Some of my most popular ones are Never Move For Money!, Fixing your W2 Withholding for Fun and Profit, and Sales, lies, and videotape.
I’ve been thinking a lot about online security and our finances recently. Doesn’t it scare you that someone could literally spend a few hours at a computer, and probably destroy your life for months, if they manage to break into your bank account or one of your other web-based accounts? It scares me.
This week, I spent some time writing a guest post for Moolanomy about this very topic (it will hopefully be posted sometime in the next few days, if it hasn’t been already), and I covered a few basic things we all should be doing to protect our online financial identies from thieves. This is stuff like making sure your bank has enhanced online security measures available to you (and using them), and making sure you’re using secure passwords on any sites where you are storing personally identifiable information. This is good stuff, but really, it isn’t enough.
Why? Because if someone breaks into your computer and puts a virus on it (or you just pick one up roaming around the web), all of that work is for naught. My girlfriend and I learned this first hand when she got a virus on her laptop that had a keystroke logger built into it – basically, it was on the prowl for any usernames or passwords we used to log into any of our websites. Talk about a flurry of activity, finding a clean computer and changing all of our passwords. No fun. And I only used her computer once to log in and check my balance.
So, what can you do? Here are some things to make sure you have set up:
- A basic in-home firewall – most routers cover this for you, but if you’re plugging straight into your cable modem, you may want to consider a software solution
- Up to date virus protection – there are plenty of free ones available, as well as the commercial packages that are out there from McAfee or Norton. All of them are about the same – I currently use Avira and am pretty happy with it, even though I have to deal with some nag screens because I haven’t paid for it this year.
- Always connect to secure sites (such as your bank) using https (the link in the address bar should look like https://www.yourbankhere.com) – this will encrypt all of your communication with that bank, not just what they require.
- Set up unique usernames for each of your financial sites, and come up with a strong password formula
- Pick financial institutions with extra security features, and use them.
In the Moolanomy piece (which I will link back to when it is active), I talk a good deal about those last two bullet points. At some point I will do the same thing here. I don’t want to go into detail about this today, but I thought it was worth breaking out of my current blogging theme to talk about. What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions on how to secure yourself when working online?
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So, you want to know what's up with the brackets in the name? "Curly brackets (also called braces, or "squiggly brackets") are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices" and "Square brackets are mainly used to enclose explanatory or missing material usually added by someone other than the original author, especially in quoted text." So basically, if you really want to be wealthy in life, you have to figure out how to get happy. Since that whole spiel would make a crappy name for a blog, I decided to do something a bit creative with some brackets.
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