Thanksgiving is a time for remembering the amazing things in our life that we are thankful for, eating copious amounts of food, acting kindly to strangers, and of course football. Let’s think about football for a second. On each side of the line of scrimmage you have large blockers and defensive linemen trying to get the precious pigskin from the quarterback before he lands a reception to the receiver. Without the offensive line the quarterback doesn’t stand a chance against the rushing defensive line. He’s toast.
Quite similar to an online transaction really.
In the online world, you have the football (your credit card), the passer (you), and the defensive linemen (spammers / phishers / badguys). Depending on how you protect yourself, you can either make a successful pass to the receiver (amazon.com) or you can get nailed by the bad guys. What type of protection do you have for your precious information?
58% of shoppers this year intend on buying at least one gift online, while 70% overall are planning on filling their entire list from online retailers. In preparation of this deluge of transactions the bad guys have been hard at work as well. These guys are busy sending out millions upon millions of spam messages trying to hawk their fake Rolexes and their Viagra pills. Some of them are harmless, simply delete the mail. Others, however, contain viruses and malware.
Attackers will be creating fake e-commerce sites hoping users will voluntarily hand over their information, a socially engineered cyberattack, as opposed to more elaborate, technical methods in a cybercriminal’s arsenal. and even spoofed websites that look and feel exactly like the one’s your used to buying from.
If you fall for the last one, you’re basically handing your credit cards into the hands of evil doers.
I encourage online purchases, and will do almost all of my shopping from the comfort of my living room this year, with the exception of a few items. But every year I hear horror stories of identity theft and computer corruption. So, go ahead and pick up that new TV for your lovely husband, after all, the lawn didn’t mow itself. But make sure that take some basic procedures into play first.
- Do not leave your wireless network at home open.
- Do not click directly on links embedded in emails. Copy and paste them into a browser first, and
make sure that it’s really amazon.com and not amazzon.com or any other misspellings.
- When possible, use secure services that offer fraud protection such as PayPal.
- Incorporate an awesome spam filter, not one that is software based but rather service based. I
prefer Postini.
If you’re an online retailer, make sure that you are behind a managed firewall in a secure data center and using a secure connection. It’s only fair to the people helping you put presents under the tree!
Happy Holidays, and safe shopping!
-Ben
(Oh, and if you’re interested, I’m hoping Santa brings me a new pair of Infinity Kappa 462.9cfp speakers, found on Ebay and they accept Pay Pal 
)
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