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There are more than 28 new victims of identity theft every minute! Even worse, cases of identity theft have continued to increase dramatically year after year since 2001.

An identity thief can use your stolen identity to receive medical treatment, rent a car, lease an apartment, apply for a job…they could even commit a crime in your name!

Never post your IP address in a public place because once a hacker knows your Internet Protocol (IP) address e.g. 122.453.002.03) they can begin hacking you.

Always run your firewall and antivirus programs first. Your firewall and antivirus programs should always be running before your computer connects to the Internet. If for some reason you want to turn these programs off, make sure you have first disconnected from the Internet. It is also a very good idea to enable automatic software updates in these programs so they stay up-to-date.

When you are not using your computer, disconnect it from the Internet. One of the worst things that can happen is when a hacker breaks into your computer and you don’t even know it. To prevent unknown attacks, your computer should be disconnected from the Internet when not in use.

There are various ways to disconnect from the Internet, you could: shut down the computer, put the computer in Windows’ Standby mode (Start/Shutdown/Standby), break the Windows’ Internet connection, or power down your modem or unplug your LAN cable. Some firewalls come with a blocking function which blocks all incoming and outgoing connections to the Internet.

Using a firewall in addition to anti-virus software helps keep your computer safe from viruses AND hackers.

With the ever increasing popularity of wireless internet connections, individuals are now often connecting to unsecured Wi-Fi networks to access the Internet instead of paying for their own accounts. The person with the unsecured wi-fi connection is at risk and so is the person suing that connection.

The most effective defensive strategy against all types of hacking is to simply ensure you are never connected to a wireless network that does not have a password protection. If you are setting up your own network, enable the password protection and keep the password information in a secure place. You will need this information at a later date if you decide to access the connection with more computers in your home.

Oops, they did it again. McAfee released an update to its antivirus definitions for corporate customers that mistakenly deleted a crucial Windows XP file, sending systems into a reboot loop and requiring tedious manual repairs. It’s not the first strike for the company, either. MORE

Dictionary - With Dictionary as a part of Mac OS X (10.4 and later) there is a feature that not too many Mac users know about.

When you are in any Mac native applications you can hover your mouse above a word and press Ctrl-Cmd-D on your keyboard. You will get the Dictionary description for that word. Just move your mouse over to any other word and the Dictionary description for that word is displayed instantly.

You do not need to have the Dictionary open at all.

A few applications where this works are; Safari, Mail.app, MacJournal, TextEdit, Text Wrangler, Comic Life, iWeb, etc. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with any of the Mozilla applications, including Firefox, Camino and Flock.

Invert Screen

Another function that not too many Mac users know is Invert screen. Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard and see your Mac invert its colors.

Slow Motion

When you want to minimize a window, click on the yellow button in the top left corner. The window quickly goes down to the right end of your dock using either scaled or genie effect.

If you hold down the Shift key while clicking the window will minimize in a slow motion, approximately five times slower than the normal speed.

Text Clipping

If you want to save a chunk of text from the document you are viewing at the moment, for example a web page. Simply select the text, click on it and drag it to the desktop.

If you want to include the text somewhere, say in an email, you simply click the file on desktop and drag it into your composed email.

Screen Capturing

There are a few ways to capture the screen on a Mac.

You can capture the whole screen by pressing Cmd-Shift-3 on your keyboard and the screen will be captured in a PNG file and saved on your desktop as something like Picture 1.png. As of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) this file is names

You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small cross hair selector on your screen.

Select the area you want to capture and let go, the file will be saved on your desktop, again something like Picture 1.png. As of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) you also get the information on the picture size (in pixels) which changes as you move the crosshair.

You can also capture the active window. Simply follow the steps above and once you see the cross hair, press the space bar and you will get a camera icon. Hover the camera above any window and the window will get the gray overlay indicating it’s in hot-spot. You can even capture the window that is in the background, as long as a part of it visible and allows you enough room to hover the camera icon over it. Click on it and the window will be captured. The file will be placed on your desktop as Photo 1.png

However, if you’d like to capture the screen (or part of it) to the clipboard rather than to desktop, simply hold the Control key down while capturing, i.e. Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4.

This is very handy when you need to paste the screen capture right into an email or other document.

Have you been receiving emails with this header lately?
Facebook Password Reset Confirmation! Your Support.
If so, then be sure to DELETE it right away as its a password scam specifically attacking Facebook users.

I can’t even remember the first time “I” got this email but it immediately struck me as odd. You know why? ANYTHING that talks about “passwords” is already fishy right? And this email even ask you to download something… DOUBLE FISHY!

Here’s the content of this Facebook email scam so you get familiar with it.

If you click on the document attached to the SPAM email, you open the door of your Facebook account to hackers whose sole objective is to STEAL passwords from Facebook users’ profiles, giving them access to loads of private and personal stuff on you AND your Facebook friends.

When I first got this message, I just deleted it but I started to receive like 5-10 DAILY so I zapped it with an anti-virus program. It worked but now I am getting it again and it has a different “From:” information this time. If before it the email was from “Facebook Security”, now it’s from “Facebook Messages Center”. But yes, it’s still the same bad trick so do beware!

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Infected with malware already or want to know what to do in such an event?
Find out what you can do to uninstall malware from your PC.

The Consumerist, an online shopper’s blog, recently published a good how-to article on how to spot fake reviews for products online. Among the the things to watch out for, the site points out that variations of a certain reviewer’s name and “glowing” reviews of the product can raise a red flag. Check out the article at this link for more items to watch out for: Spot Fake Online Reviews.

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee plans to establish “web science.”

British prime minister Gordon Brown is promising £30 million to fund the establishment of a UK-based “Institute of Web Science” to be jointly run by two of the UK’s leading research universities.

Click here for more information.