How to Remain Secure on Cyber Monday

With Cyber Monday almost here, it's very important to equip your computer with powerful and well-developed technologies which would be able to defend you and keep your data secure during the entire holiday shopping season. Today, the Zone Alarm developers, Check Point Software Technologies, offered several pieces of advice on how to remain secure and buy products online without any threat.

For those of you who don't know what Cyber Monday is, it marks the beginning of the holiday shopping
season. This day is usually the best time for shopping because most merchants launch special offers and
prices for a wide category of products, all of them accessible via the Internet. Because millions of consumers will go online for shopping, some bad-intended persons a.k.a. attackers, phishers, scammers, hackers (you can call them however you want) will surely attempt to steal your money, products or even financial information.

"Internet holiday attacks get more advanced each year, but many people are still relying on outdated or nonexistent security solutions, which put their computers and identities at risk," said Laura Yecies, vice president and general manager of Check Point’s ZoneAlarm consumer division. "To stay safe online this holiday season consumers need to educate themselves on the latest types of threats, and make sure they are running up-to-date and comprehensive security software on their PCs."

Now that we understood that we have to secure our computers against hackers and attackers, what can we do to reach this goal? Well, the Zone Alarm creators give us some advice which might be really useful for an online holiday shopper:

1. Secure your computer with a powerful firewall, antivirus, antispyware and other security solution which could be able to block malicious attempts targeting your system.
2. Avoid publishing your details and especially the financial information on untrusted websites which doesn't seem to be genuine as some of them might be actually some phishing attacks.
3. Secure your browser in order to be able to protect your privacy as well as your identity. Beware! In the last few months more and more users became victims of identity theft!
4. Do not donate money to the organizations or websites promoted by email spam. Only donate money to trusted charities!
5. Buy stuff from the known merchants and websites. Some attackers might attempt to create fake online shops in order to steal users' information.


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By: Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor