I get a lot of junk in my mailbox everyday. Today the count was like 294. Most of them I know is junk from the subject line. The usual viagra, canadian pharmacy you have won the euro lottery, my south american inheritance. Once in a while I will get the Bank of America ones telling me to update my details blah. The ones that stump me are the ones that sneak into my inbox somehow and where I have a legit account. They will have the same colour as the real company. The logo will be perfect. The format will be exact as the ones you get in the mail. The link will even go to the fake site that looks like the real site. I almost replied to one a few months ago. Something made me stop. I remembered vaguely reading the important information in the security section of the real site. It went something like this

• We will never send you an email asking for your personal information
• We will never ask your for you log in information in an email
• We will always address you with your full name (registered name) and nothing else

Ah ha! this email said dear valued customer! can you reset your log in password as we have had some tech difficulties blah blah. Don’t be fooled by the look and feel of these type of emails . By rule never give out personal information in email especially log in password or bank account details. Online theft costs $1 trillion a year, the number of attacks is rising sharply and too many people do not know how to protect themselves say the experts.

• Set your passwords to real difficult
• Don’t have the same password across board
• Change your passwords frequently
• Have good security programs on the computer that you login to your bank account.

To change your password frequently and finding a difficult password is tedious. I use Roboform to generate random passwords for me in a second.