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Web Safety 2.0
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Thu, Aug 16, 2007
The Business Times
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>SECURITY firm ThinkSecure has the following advice for individuals looking to reduce their risk while using the latest Web 2.0 services:
- Do not disclose more personal information online than you would in the real world. If at all possible, do not disclose anything online that could be tied back to you in the real world. In many cases, this could be easier said than done, but this should be followed as closely and as often as possible.
- Do not believe every piece of information that you find or receive online, especially those upon which you would have to base important decisions on. As the interactivity goes up, so does the chance of false or misleading information being packaged into something legitimate looking. Try to correlate the information you're interested in across multiple unrelated sources.
- Use different browsers from different vendors to surf different sites. For example, use one browser only to do Internet banking and nothing else and use another for casual surfing. This limits the amount of information that can be lost as a result of browser cookie-store or browser cache raiding.
- Use trusted browser addon software (eg NoScript on the Mozilla Firefox browser) to limit one's exposure to technologies like Javascript, Java, and Flash, on non-trusted websites. While this will not stop an exploit planted on a trusted Web 2.0 site that you frequent, it adds one more brick in the risk-minimisation wall that you are trying to erect, and a low wall is better than no wall.
- Keep your browser up to date by enabling their "auto-update" functionality. This enables them to automatically download and install security patches from their respective vendors whenever the vendors make them available.
- Whenever possible, keep yourself abreast of such online threats through various forms of education, such as subscribing to free regular mailing lists about Web and other forms of IT-related security or, if you are an IT-professional tasked by an organisation to advise about and defend against security threats, attend various courses which contain Web security content.
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