4. Never provide personal or financial information to a non-secure website. A "secure" website is indicated by "HTTPS" in address bar, and a small padlock icon in lower right-hand corner of your browser window. http://www.verisign.com/advisor/check.html is a free place to check your browser's security capabilities.

5. Never provide confidential or financial information in response to an email request. Legitimate companies will never ask for personal or financial information over an insecure medium like email. Attempts to trick people into revealing personal and financial information through impersonated email messages is known as "Phishing." Some of these messages look very official and may come what appears to be a bona fide bank or company. Beware! When unsure if an email message is genuine it's best to telephone company in question. Phishing email messages may be reported to http://www.antiphishing.org/.

6. Read fine print before typing in private personal information. Always read privacy policy of a website to understand how they will use your information. Will they share or sell it? Be suspicious if no privacy policy is visible.

7. Never download or accept any file or program from an un-trusted source. Adware and Spyware are frequently bundled with "free" programs. You may download one program and find that your computer becomes infected with a Spyware programs.

8. Be wary and virus check all email attachments. Never open an unexpected email attachment, even from known friends or business senders. Their computers may be infected. Self-spreading worms can infect a computer and then send an infected email-attachment to everyone in owner's address book.

Malicious Internet threats are clearly a formidable enemy; however, good news is that tools and information are readily available so that you can enjoy Internet without putting your computer and confidential information at risk.

PassPhrases are a concept that will help us create more secure, easy to remember safeguards for our computer and network resource protection. A passphrase is a selection of words and/or numbers that are 15 characters or more in length, and are easy for us to remember. A couple examples of a good pass phrases are:

•igotodalaieejdaily •shehasbeautifulhair •surfinginhawaiiisgreat

According to Mark Minasi, a noted security consultant, a 15 character pass phrase will require a cracking program following number of computations to try and break a 15 character pass phrase:

•15 lowercase letters = 1,677,259,342,285,725,925,376 possibilities •Try a million a second, it’ll take 531,855 centuries/years to break code

As you can see, this is a pretty good level of security for your resource.

Another concern with passwords is if you forget or lose password, and are using a utility like Microsoft’s Encrypting File System (EFS), you run risk of losing all access to your important files if you require a hardware reset of your password. All EFS encrypted files are linked to your login profile, meaning if you encrypt a directory or file with EFS, and you do a hardware reset on your computer, those files and directories are lost FOREVER.

For Microsoft Windows users you can now also use spaces within your pass phrase, however we would not recommend embedding spaces in your pass phrase, as that actually does allow a cracker better access to getting your code – it may help them crack it in 100,000 years rather than 250,000!