Tips for Ecommerce Safety

With eCommerce having been growing rapidly in recent years, and the rise of identity theft, hacking, etc. causing much of a disturbance within the computing-community, there is many different ways you can protect yourself, your identity, and credit by following the outline I am about to present to you below. Remember, nothing is every 100%, but you can always get as close to 100% as possible.

1. Use well known websites. Personally I only use websites like Walmart.com, and Amazon.com. I don’t order from personal stores because you never know what you will actually get, user reviews can be faked (as they can be with any website for that matter). You really won’t ever have to order from anywhere but Amazon – mostly – they have just about anything you could ever imagine. Also a side note, make sure whenever visiting the website that you are spelling the website name correctly, and using a TLD (top level domain). This is one way hackers will take card information.

2. Look for the Lock. Pc mag summed this up very well in saying “Never ever, ever buy anything online using your credit card from a site that doesn’t have SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption installed—at the very least. You’ll know if the site has SSL because the URL for the site will start with HTTPS:// (instead of just HTTP://). An icon of a locked padlock will appear, typically in the status bar at the bottom of your web browser, or right next to the URL in the address bar. It depends on your browser. Never, ever give anyone your credit card over email. Ever. ”
3. Check your baking statements. Check the banking statements as often as possible, especially during the holiday shopping season. Make sure that companies are not charging you extra, or for products you didn’t buy. If you do see faulty charges call your bank as soon as possible. You have usually around 30 days to get faulty charges cleared up.

4. Secure your computer. Many internet security programs such as Web-Root have ID theft protection on them that you should feel inclined to use. Web-Root costs, there is a free, and well-reviewed program by the name of Ad-Aware Free Internet Security. I personally use Avast, but it doesn’t have this feature. Make sure you run your security programs frequently to make sure programs are not being installed in the background to take your personal information and credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.

5. Use robust passwords. This is another big thing you NEED to take into consideration. Your password NEEDS to be – regardless of the minimum that the website you are buying from requires – 8-10 alphanumeric characters long. That means lowercase and uppercase letters mixed with numbers. Here is some arbitrary example to show you what I am meaning: Bass3Tt3Nterpr1se. That is well over the volume of what I said to use, but I just used the website name to give an example. Take note of the mix between capitol, and lowercase letters mixed with numbers. Those are essential. It makes it much more difficult for people to guess your password. Also, it makes it much more difficult for hackers to brute force their way into your account.

6. Circumvent public internet. When using a public computer, or even a friends computer they could have a key logger logging your keystrokes (remember, never trust anyone these days). If you have no choice but to use a public or friends computer, make sure when you log into any of your accounts that when prompted by most browsers to save the password you deny the authentication. Also, another big issue is MAKE SURE YOU LOG OUT! A person, or anyone who gets on the computer, would have to do is go in and change the address where products are shipped. They have full access to your credit card numbers.

7. Know when something is too good to be true. Not much to explain here. Use common sense when buying stuff online. Remember, you cannot ever be 100% sure that you will get the product that you actually want. Order from well-known and trusted vendors. If something looks too good to be true; don’t risk it.

That’s about it. I could really go on and on about security, but this is a good backbone. Follow these steps, and make sure you keep up to date with your antivirus, antispyware, etc. programs and you should be good to go.

Thank you for taking the time out to read this. It’s almost 800 words! Thanks again!

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