Tip 5 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Online Shopping Safety Tips.

Many crooks – both online and offline – rely on their victims apathy or reluctance to complain or speak out against them in order to stay hidden from legal scrutiny. Don’t be apathetic. If you’ve lost money or goods then tell someone. Tell the police and they will be able to direct you to your next place of enquiry. Remember – you may not have lost very much money, but what will the next victim lose? What will you lose next time?

Outing the criminal fraternity reduces their effectiveness. Education of potential victims also reduces the effects of crime. All great journeys start with a single step and it takes very little effort for you to be part of that journey and to make that step.

Tip 4 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Online Shopping Safety Tips.

Keeping records is really, really easy. Write important facts in a notebook. Print out details of transactions, order confirmations, cancellations and everything else you can think of.

While your ownership of a good, auditable, paper trail is unlikely to prevent online fraud from striking, it does put you in a stronger position when you come to clean up the mess. A stitch in time saves nine, so the old proverb goes, and this is no exception: spend a few minutes gathering the necessary data now and the recovery process could be that much simpler.

Tip 3 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Online Shopping Safety Tips.

A secure site is one which has been certified as being secured from opportunistic attempts to steal your personal information (including card numbers) as they are passed from your computer to the site. The site may have nothing to do with such an interception, so even if you trust the name with which you are dealing you should consider this quick rule.

A secure site is identified in two ways: firstly a padlock should appear in the status bar towards the base of your web browser; secondly the web address in the address bar will be proceeded with ‘https://’ rather than the standard ‘http://’ (note the lack of ’s’).

An unsecured site (like this one!) shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as bad, but you certainly should think very hard about passing your private information to one.

Tip 2 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Online Shopping Safety Tips.

We’ve all had the spam emails – known as 419 scams on account of the Nigerian law that covers the fraud – from rich princes, lawyers, doctors or prime ministers requesting assistance in moving huge sums of money. It seems to good to be true, and it is. Thankfully most people are becoming aware of the fraud that these emails are attempting to commit, but sometimes it is not as easy.

With auction sites such as eBay becoming more and more popular, smaller-scale frauds are occurring more regularly, with sellers (or buyers) attempting to circumvent the consumer protection put in place by the marketplace. The Internet National Fraud Information Center Watch reports that unsolicited offers by sellers represented 22% of scams in 2004.

Simply asking yourself if emails or messages appear legitimate before responding will help prevent most of these opportunistic crimes. Remember: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Tip 1 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Online Shopping Safety Tips.

Using only one credit card – and then one with only a small, controlled limit – means damage limitation. Use of one credit card will not prevent online fraud, but will limit the damage that stolen details can do. Credit cards often allow you to claim back funds that were taken from the card fraudulently (though you need to check with your card issuer on this point), and this may help in getting back most if not all of the stolen money.

Using more than one cards, or a debit card, means that the amount of money the perpetrators are able to get their hands on grows greatly. Pre-paid credit cards may be an excellent way to limit the amount of money you could potentially loose.

If you can’t stop the fraud in the first place, then the next best solution is to limit the damage it can do.

Tip 9 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Windows Security Tips.

Your browser has built-in security features that ensure your browsing is relatively problem-free. Features such as limiting the amount of Javascript that can be run in your browser, disabling of the saving of passwords and the like, can be very useful. Likewise your email program will have a number of settings that help to protect you from some of the nasties in the world. Be sure to check the settings and options of both programs and set the security level to the highest practicable.

As with anti-virus and firewalls, software security settings are not a panacea, and caution should still be exercises, but it is nonetheless another useful tool in the prudent computer user’s arsenal.

A brief overview of the process of creating regular backups of your data.

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• Why Should I Backup?
• Windows Security Tips: 1 - Keep Regular Backups

Creating a backup is easy. Honestly. The basic principle is that a copy of the data should be taken from your computer, stored on some other medium, then kept in a safe place. Like photocopying an important document in case the original gets damaged, so you’re taking a carbon copy of the data stored on your computer. There are many, many methods by with which you can perform a successful backup - these will be introduced in a later article - but choosing which one to employ requires a little bit of thought.

Choosing the best method by which to backup your data depends greatly on, amongst others, these factors:

1. How much data do you wish to backup?
2. How often does your data change (and hence how often do you need to make backups)?

Looking at these in order:

How much data do you wish to backup?
Small amounts of data can easily be stored online. There are many sites on the internet that will allow you - often for free - to transfer your data to their servers. Unfortunately the transfer of data to the service’s servers may prove a bridge to far for those of us with more data or less patience.  Read more about backing up data online on our sister site, Perfect Backups.

Sites to consider are: Mozy and iDrive.

Purchasing an external hard drive, on the other hand, may be overkill for those with only one or two vital documents to protect.

How often does your data change?
If you use your computer only occasionally, or you rarely place on it any data that you wish to keep, then there is very little point in creating a fresh backup every night. If, on the other hand, you are constantly using your computer to run a business or for keeping records for a local club (for example), then your activity may warrant daily or twice-daily backups. It might be useful to consider how important the data is to you. Ask yourself: ‘can I live without the information that changed or entered onto the computer today’. If the answer is ‘no’, then it’s time for a new backup. There is no set rule to this, and you must judge for yourself how frequently you will perform the process.

Before you dive into the process of performing regular backups, you need to decide what is the best way to go about it. Setting off on the wrong foot will be wasted effort at best, and damaging to your computer and data at worst.

For further discussion on the backup process, see the other articles in our Data Backup category. You may also like to visit our sister site Perfect Backups for a comprehensive assessment of the backup process, including comprehensive guides on creating the perfect backup [coming soon…]. We are add more articles on a regular basis, so be sure to check back soon.

Why not add us to your favourites to save you having to remember the address?

A brief discussion on the merits of creating regular backups of your data.

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• Windows Security Tips: 1 - Keep Regular Backups
• How Do I Create A Backup?

Although there is no way to put a monetary value on the data stored on your computer, its loss will often cause more problems than the loss or malfunction of hardware. Computer hardware can be replaced relatively quickly and cheaply; unique data may have been built up over years of research and work, recording or collection.

Data loss can be absolutely catastrophic to businesses of any size. Loss can also be heartbreaking for home users when irreplaceable digital artifacts (think of that large, unique, photograph collection you built up over five years of happy snapping) are lost forever.

There is a solution: take a copy of the data and store it somewhere safe. The copy of your data is known as a backup.

Taking a backup of large amounts of data is sometimes considered difficult or painful enough to consider simply not doing it, and this prevents people from taking the first vital steps towards educating themselves on the topic. This is a dangerous and unnecessary attitude to adopt.

While backups may take a little work each time it is required, it is nothing compared to the work required to restore the data that you’re saving. If you are able to automate the process (and you do not need a big business budget to be able to do this), then a little initial work may be all that is required and you can let it run on its own from thereon.

The concept of ’saving time’ by not creating backups is certainly a misnomer and a serious false economy.

For further discussion on the backup process, see the other articles in our Data Backup category. You may also like to visit our sister site Perfect Backups for a comprehensive assessment of the backup process. We are add more articles on a regular basis, so be sure to check back soon. Why not add us to your favourites to save you having to remember the address?

With more and more people gradually beginning to accept the internet as a valid marketplace, consumer spending in 2004 hit a record $65.1 billion. As more people trusted websites as a safe way to purchase their goods, so more people were stung by online fraud. More consumers shopping online means more opportunity for organized (and opportunistic) crime through the internet, and as people become more trusting their vigilance wanes accordingly.

Victims of fraud from the first six months of 2005 lost an average of $2,759; comparing this with an average of $895 for the whole of 2004 gives some indication of the exponential rise in attacks.

Online crime can manifest itself in a number of ways: complaints in 2004 relating to general purchases of goods, including instances where goods were not received or were not as described, accounted for 30% of the fraud complaints. Similar complaints relating to internet auction sites accounted for the biggest proportion of problems, taking up a mighty 44% of the whole.

With identity theft and ‘phishing’ only become more popular within the online underworld, it is only prudent to arm oneself with a few easy to execute hints and tips. Using commonsense when dealing with internet transactions may not guarantee a fraud-free experience – naturally it is impossible to predict what the other party to the transaction may do – but it will go a long way to preventing you getting ripped off. Certainly a little caution can only help.

Tip 8 in an occasional series. Keep visiting regularly for more Windows Security Tips.

There may come a time when you spot some software on your computer, on a CD, floppy disk, thumb drive or even on the internet, that you’ve never seen before. You don’t know how it got there; you can’t imagine how it could have got there. DON’T OPEN IT. Leave it where it is until you’re absolutely 100% sure what the software is. Run your Anti-virus software on the program, then run another, just for luck. There are a number of online utilities that will check your computer - or even specific files - for viruses, and it is most definitely worth trying a few of these before going any further with the suspicious program.

On the other side of the coin, it can often be problematic if you start deleting files unless you truly are sure that it they contain viruses: many system files can be mistaken for virii to the inexperienced eye (and even to some experienced ones!).