March 16, 2010

10 Online Safety Tips for Kids and Families.

10 Online Safety Tips for Kids and Families.

You don’t need us to tell you how important online safety for your family is, especially if you have kids still living at home. Local and national news sources help illustrate this point almost every day with stories about online scams, Internet perverts, and worse. But today we’re going to help you prevent any more of those stories by giving out some basic online safety tips for you and your family.

With the proper guidance, you can help make sure that you’ve done everything you can to help your kids surf safely on the Internet. Take a look at the list we’ve compiled below and see if there’s anything here you haven’t tried yet.

  1. Always sit with younger children when they’re online. Keep a few bookmarks that they can easily access to get to kid-friendly web sites.

  2. Help your kids create fun online nicknames that don’t give away personal information.

  3. Keep any computers that are connected to the Internet in an open area where your children can be easily supervised.

  4. Ensure that your kids aren’t sharing personally-identifiable and/or sensitive information with people they meet online. Examples of info to keep private include:

    • his/her real name,

    • the physical address of their home,

    • whether or not their parents, guardians, or other responsible adult are home,

    • any phone number (home or cell), or

    • passwords.

  5. Let them know that it’s not OK to use the Internet to gossip, cyberbully, or threaten anyone online, even if they mean it as a joke.

  6. Let your children know that it’s OK to tell you if something (or someone) on the Internet makes them feel uncomfortable or threatened.

  7. Make sure they know it’s never OK to meet an online friend without parental permission.

  8. Set clear rules for appropriate Internet use. Things you should consider are the types of web sites that are off limits, specific Internet hours, and what (if any) information can be shared online.

  9. Talk to your children about what web sites they visit and who they’re chatting with.

  10. Talk with your kids about computers and be open to their questions.

The online safety tips we’ve listed above are a good starting point for any family with children who are old enough to use computers, but they are by no means an exhaustive list. Monitor how much your kids use the Internet, see what’s working and what isn’t, and stay involved.

If you think we’ve missed anything, or if you have a story about how your family talks about online safety, please leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/inferis/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

If you're looking for great anti-virus software that won't break the bank, try StopSign. You don't pay extra for tech support for difficult malware, and our web protection software just works. Download & install StopSign to find out why our members choose us over the other options.

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February 2, 2010

Bionic Passwords: Better, Stronger, and Faster.

Bionic Passwords: Better, Stronger, and Faster.

OK, we can’t get your passwords to become faster, but certainly we can give you tips on how to make them better and stronger (read: harder to break). Our last post on passwords gave a lot of information on how good passwords can be easily created, and we’ve come up with more ideas for you to secure your passwords.

A strong password is the first line of defense against anyone who would want to break into your account, so the tougher you make it on them, the less likely it will be that they get what they want. Use these tips to create a bionic password that will make it tougher to crack.

  • Get creative with words:

    You can get a lot of traction out of one word if you can figure out different ways to use it in your password. For example the word “crystal” is pretty clear (pun intended), but you can muddy it up a bit by doing things like removing all vowels, changing how it’s spelled, or reversing certain letters. Examples include “crstl”, “krYs+al”, and “ltsrc” (the first one, only backwards). Mix that up with another word to increase the length of the password and you’ll be good to go.

  • The same word, only different:

    Maybe you like birds, and your favorite bird is the Pine Grosbeak bullfinch. Well, as we all know (sarcasm) the genus for those birds is “Pinicola”. Maybe you also happen to love Coca-Cola. You take out the “cola”, insert “Coke”, and now you have a 2-word password that’s easy to remember: “PiniCoke”. Substitute some of the characters to something like this: “p1niCok3” and you’re good to go.

  • Don’t use common number patterns:

    Your phone number, street address, even your jersey number from the high school football team… these are all very bad things to use in a password as they are. If you plan on using one of them, be sure to mix things up. If you live on 1313 Mockingbird Lane (Quick… what TV show is that address from? The first person to comment on the blog with the right answer gets a free year of StopSign.), you could use the street number like this: “+h1rT3en13”.

  • Mix it up:

    Using only alpha-characters or only numbers isn’t a very good idea for a password at all. Your password is a digital cocktail. Mix. It. Up. If a decent password is made up of 8 or more characters, you should try to use at least 2 numbers and one non-alphanumeric character (a hash symbol “#”, an exclamation mark “!”, etc.).

  • Use multiple passwords:

    Ideally you should have a unique password for every account that you have. Your home email, work email, computer login, bank account, Twitter… any account you have that requires a user name and password should have its own unique password.

These suggestions are not the end-all, be-all and we don’t necessarily advocate using every single password tip listed. But they can be food for thought when devising a new password. You’ve seen my repeated suggestion to mix things up, and that’s a big thing. Keep things fresh, get creative, and you’ll be far and away ahead of the pack when it comes to creating a strong (and difficult to crack) password.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jase_n_tonic/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

If you're looking for great anti-virus software that won't break the bank, try StopSign. You don't pay extra for tech support for difficult malware, and our web protection software just works. Download & install StopSign to find out why our members choose us over the other options.

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January 29, 2010

The Week in Review for 01-29-2010.

Here are a few selected RT‘s and assorted information from the StopSign Twitter account you may have missed this week. Did we miss anything? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.

And here’s a StopSign blog post we talked about on Twitter, too…

  • We released a new blog article titled “7 Tips for Better Email Etiquette“. In it you’ll find ways to not only be courteous, but also to make sure that your point gets across.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our blog! We want to hear from you on the @stopsigntweets Twitter account and here on our blog, so don’t be afraid to ask us a question, give us some feedback or just say “Hi”.

If you're looking for great anti-virus software that won't break the bank, try StopSign. You don't pay extra for tech support for difficult malware, and our web protection software just works. Download & install StopSign to find out why our members choose us over the other options.

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January 22, 2010

The Week in Review for 01-22-2010.

Here are a few selected RT‘s and assorted information from the StopSign Twitter account you may have missed this week. Did we miss anything? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.

And here are a couple of StopSign blog posts we talked about on Twitter, too…

Have a great weekend, and keep those tweets coming! We’d love to hear from you on the @stopsigntweets Twitter account and here on our blog.

If you're looking for great anti-virus software that won't break the bank, try StopSign. You don't pay extra for tech support for difficult malware, and our web protection software just works. Download & install StopSign to find out why our members choose us over the other options.

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November 12, 2009

3 Things Your Username Shouldn’t Say About You.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

From “Romeo and Juliet“, by William Shakespeare

The creation of a username (or user ID) for any online service or account is often overlooked as a topic of Internet safety. Although the username you create for your bank’s web site may not be viewed by many people, your email, social network, and instant message (AKA “IM“) usernames will be viewed by dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of people (depending on your popularity online and/or the openness of the service).

When choosing a username it’s best to not take any chances. Crooks, predators, fraudsters, scammers… anyone with ill intentions might be able to wedge their way into your life to cause problems. There are 3 types of personal information found in many usernames that might be useful to the bad guys, which we’ll discuss below.

Note: In the sections below we use various usernames as examples. These are not intended to be the usernames of actual people, and any similarity is purely coincidental.

Age

This is especially important for children, as their usernames can be displayed to all kinds of unsavory characters online, from sexual predators to cyberbullys. When helping your child select a username for themselves, be careful not to reveal their age.

Here are some examples of age-defining usernames:

  • Little15 Shows the age of the user.
  • Bobby1997 The full year of the users birth.
  • Kewl95Dude The partial year of the users birth.

Location

Area codes, city/county names, zip codes, phone prefixes… there are many ways to give a crook or scammer information on where you live. Remember the movie “You’ve Got Mail“? Tom Hanks’ character used his building number in his username (“NY152”). Rich guy, building in his username… there’s some quick and easy info for a baddie to pick up on. Don’t be that guy (or gal).

Here are some examples of location-defining usernames:

  • Alice90210 The zip code of the user
  • Derrick212 The area code of the user
  • KingCoKyle The county of the user. (e.g. “King County”)

Gender

Whether you’re a man or a woman, it’s easier to identify people when you know more things about them. If, for example, someone wanted to cyber-stalk you, it would be easier to pick you out in a crowd if they could eliminate half of the group by only looking for one sex vs. the other.

Here are some examples of gender-defining usernames:

  • LadyInRed
  • MisterMan
  • MrsHotPotato

A few things to note

We’re detailing suggestions, not absolutes. If you’re 87 years old and decide that HappyGramps87 is the username for you, then you’ll probably be fine since age is much more of an issue for children. And, of course, there are things that shouldn’t need to be said like putting things like your PIN or Social Security number in your username. Just use your best judgment and do what you think is right. And safe.

If you're looking for great anti-virus software that won't break the bank, try StopSign. You don't pay extra for tech support for difficult malware, and our web protection software just works. Download & install StopSign to find out why our members choose us over the other options.

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