Remember – like in many other aspects of our life- prevention is the best method in fighting malaise. I listed some (mostly free) tools/practices (which I actively use/follow myself) for keeping the online thieves and swindlers out of your pockets, email, identity details and generally – out of your lives:
- LastPass – a great way to keep your passwords in cloud (away from local browser “password managers”) and share them between computers and even mobile devices (virtually all systems are supported). Also supports multiple identities, storing credit card information, notes etc. Has a feature of generating virtually uncrackable passwords. Appears to be absolutely safe to use (all the data is triple-encrypted before sent out to the LastPass server). Just make sure you use a really strong master password – on a bright side it’s the only (‘last’) password you will have to memorize.
- Mailinator.com – my tool of choice for disposable emails – kind of emails you would like to use once to, say, confirm a membership required just to post a trivial comment. The only potential problem – which may not be a problem in most cases at all – is that anybody can read the messages coming to your “spam account” (probability decreases proportionally to the randomness of your “spam login”). Slightly more sophisticated service which actually supports privacy is SpamGourmet.com – but for most of the cases it’s an overkill. Of course, you can also setup a special account at one of the publicly available email services, which you’d use only for such one-off purposes.
- TrueCrypt – if you ever need to encrypt a file, directory or entire drive so that even the Feds cannot crack it – this is the ultimate tool. A stand-alone application is self contained – I carry it on my keychain USB drive with some encrypted information I want to keep close to myself – and without worrying if ever I lose it.
- LockNote – if TrueCrypt is too heavy for you – use this simple yet efficient tool to keep text information – such as a credit card number, contacts or notes – locked in a single executable password protected file. Generally more appropriate for less sensitive data (for which you have LastPass and TrueCrypt).
- Sandboxie – Ever wondered if you should open a Word document or a PDF downloaded from the internet or even venture to a new website you are not sure is “healthy”? Apart from using full-fledged virtual machine system like VMware you may consider this lightweight program which, when used by any application, duly notes all the changes made to your machine and cleans them up upon your instruction. Sandboxie is basically free, if you don’t mind waiting for 5 seconds for the free version to load. Or else you may want to pay a price of EUR29 to have a lifetime home license (like I did).
- UBlock Origin (addon for Firefox and Chrome) – both protects you from sites infected by malware and reduces the amount of intrusive ads which eat into your bandwidth and slow down the pageload.
Consider it your online hygiene, make it your habit and you will most probably stay away from trouble 🙂