Friday, December 23, 2011

Clearing Internet Explorer Cookies and Temporary Internet Files

With current web technologies and companies like Facebook being caught looking into your cookies and how you surf the Internet. An important step to take for both device performance and protection of your privacy is to clear away your cookies and temporary Internet Files.

One way to prevent companies from researching where you go on the Internet and what you look at is to run your browser its unique privacy mode. For Internet Explorer, they call it In Private Browsing. You can go into this mode by selecting the Safety pull-down menu and choosing InPrivate Browsing.

Additionally, you can cut back on the amount of Internet Temporary Files and Cookies that live on your system by choosing to clear these associated files living on your machine / mobile device. To do this in Windows Internet Explorer:

Internet Explorer 9

Select Tools > Safety > Delete browsing history…/.
Make sure to uncheck Preserve Favorites website data and check both Temporary Internet Files and Cookies then click Delete.
You will get a confirmation at the bottom of the window once it has successfully cleared your cache and cookies.
Close ALL applications and reboot your system to make sure you do not have any instances of Internet Explorer running.



Internet Explorer 8

If you’re having trouble with a website, sometimes clearing your Internet Explorer temporary Internet files can help:
Select Tools & Internet Options.
Click on the General tab and then the Delete… button.
Make sure to uncheck Preserve Favorites website data and check both Temporary Internet Files and Cookies then click Delete.
Close ALL open applications and reboot your computer to insure you do not have any instances of Internet Explorer running.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Short Video on How to Tell if an Email is Fake

New trends in malware and security breaches include using personal email address books and sending email from your account, to someone you know. Typically the email may only include one sentence, if anything, an attached link to a website, sometimes with a leading sentences like:
"Check out our recent vacation pictures..."
"The funniest video I have seen in a long time..."
"I captured a picture of you naked"
"Sign up to get a free iPad"
"Your account has been deducted"
"UPS delivery"
"Important Intuit account information"
"IRS fraud notice"


It is the best policy to simply DELETE the suspicious email and NEVER click on the link.


Here is a video that can help you determine if you are seeing a fake email:

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Use Google to Find Flights!

Common there are many web sites for good and great flight ticket prices, they are in competition with the direct airlines themselves. It is important that getting a good deal will require you to actually immediately buy what you see, or else the flight will be taken or go away in minutes.
Some of the more well known and reliable sites that post excellent deals include travelocity.com, yapta.com, expedia.com, and kayak.com - Google has now added an entirely new level of shopping around for flights; Google Flights.
Check it out the next time you plan on buying a ticket.


Monday, December 19, 2011

How to Create A Strong Password

Years ago when the Internet was still 'wet behind the ears', using a simple password seemed like a good idea.

Today things have changed and it is critical to update this policy for every individual. There are too many ways for bad people to figure out your password, to leave it as a simple work or word and number. 
Here is a great and quick primer video from Google to help understand how to create a great password.

ALWAYS make a unique strong password for your email so other people cannot verify your password changes.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

An excellent blog post "The Top 10 countries with the most malicious networks" over at CountryIPBlocks has re-analyzed this list of data with interesting statistics. This original list claims the US is the biggest offender of malicious networks. This list was sorted by order of the countries with the largest NUMBER OF SPAM EMAILS.
  1. United States
  2. China
  3. Russia
  4. United Kingdom
  5. Germany
  6. Japan
  7. Brazil
  8. Romania
  9. Ukraine
  10. Turkey

Unfortunately, these results are skewed by not explaining that there is a greater per capita incidence of Intnet connected individuals. The brilliant people at CountryIPBlocks.net discovered that the ratio of NUMBER OF INFECTED NETWORKS to THE AMOUNT OF SPAM is probably the more accurate consideration. That re-adjusted Top 10 list looks like this:


Here are the results based on percentage of infected networks:
  1. Brazil 89%
  2. Turkey 54%
  3. Romania 39%
  4. China 32%
  5. Russia 11%
  6. United Kingdom 11%
  7. Japan 10%
  8. Ukraine 9%
  9. Germany 6%
  10. United States 6%





Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Password Checker Sites - Use these!


A recent popular Trojan that took account passwords from a famous technical blog site, Gawker.com has been a focus of geek attention.
The UK paper called The Telegraph also wrote about the 25 weakest passwords in use today. These accounts at Gawker were broken into because of weak passwords.
Hackers have been showing more and more interest in breaking into web accounts like Gmail, Hotmail.com, Comcast.net, Live.com, Twitter.com, Ffacebook.com, etc.

While Gmail has released something called 2 step verification as an EXCELLENT option for your Google Account, most other sites are still not doing this.

For a sanity check there are some reliable and trustworthy web sites you can use to test your existing passwords; to see how strong they are.  These great sites let you know if your password is strong enough for today's web:
Microsoft Password Strength Checker
How Secure Is My Password?
The Password Meter
WolframAlpha
our favorite Steve Gibson Password Haystack Webpage 
For creating a very complicated password, consider using Steve Gibson’s  Password Generator Webpage

This is so importnat that we have now published this on both blogs.
- credits to lifehacker.com and grc.com !