Saturday, August 11, 2012

Next time you reveal your A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location), please watch-out for predators keeping an eye on you!

“There is a huge list of scams such as online earning proposals, duplicate websites, phishing and Spam e-mails, credit card frauds and EFT (Electronic Fund Transfer) frauds.

Globally, more than $6 billion are stolen from consumer accounts by attacks called Phishing, and the scale of such frauds in India is fast catching-up too,” says Advocate Vivek Tripathi. With the availability of Internet on the move via Blackberry, i-Phones and portable USB net devices, it has become a lot easier to log in as and when desired. Our passwords, e-mail accounts, bank accounts, social networking profiles and more can be easily hacked; and not only that, our status messages and personal information lead criminals to our doorstep with incredible ease. Revealing too much information on the net such as making your contact number and residential address public is unadvisable. The moment you update a status message conveying ‘off to ___’ through another computer or mobile, someone keeping an eye on you would know where you logged in from and how authentic your information may be. Guardians of the law and those safeguarding our personal interests recommend awareness and precautions on the Internet.

Technology is man-made and so are its hazards. It depends on the user of the technology as to how he/she takes control and uses it to the optimum. It may be noted that when mind-freak programmers and criminal minds join hands, they can stir-up a deadly concoction, which can easily give the gullible a ‘kick’