Recently, a Hub writer wrote about her friend who was swindled by the online scammers.

Also, Isong Dennis reported of a client of his who lost all her money on her Liberty Account to internet hackers otherwise called Yahoo boys in Nigeria.

One challenge faced by any individual doing online transactions is internet security.

But I believe that the whole issue is mutually related. You may not be able protect t your money, intellectual property or identity without protecting two most important parameters generated by you when you sign up for internet transactions.

They are your login details-username and password. The loss of any of these pins automatically gives you away to the hackers.

How do you protect yourself in an online transaction?

• choose a complex and difficult password and username when you sign up for anything online

You would recall that most sites would show you how strong your password is while typing it while others insist that your password should be a combination of letters and numbers. These are safety precautions.

Avoid passwords that are related to your family details-name of father, mother, date of birth or any other words that people can relatively guess.

Develop unique symbols and special characters for your passwords such as underscore, asterisks, hyphen, question mark, exclamation mark,combining lower and upper case letters,adding numbers,punctuation, etc as a combination for your password. The implication could be that you may forget such password if it is too complex. So take time to commit to memory.

• Change your password and username often
• Never write your password and username anywhere

I have seen most people scribble their email address with the password or username for their online transactions on paper without considering that someone may pick it up and try it out.

If you must write it down, make it secure and very personal.

• Avoid using the same password and username for all your internet transactions

Most people may find this difficult because it may not be easy for you to remember all the passwords especially when you do varied online transactions.

• Watch the next person by your side when using a cyber cafe for your transactions

The man or woman by your side in a cafe may be a hacker, scammer or identity or intellectual property thief. Most people I know especially women have lost their money to hackers through this means. The guy peeps at what you are doing, gets the website, your login details and comes back to continue from where you stopped.

• Use HTTPS instead of HTTP to pass your identity details online

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and a network security protocol.

Strictly speaking, HTTPS is a separate protocol, but refers to the combination of a normal HTTP interaction over an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection. This ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks, provided that adequate cipher suites are used and that the server certificate is verified and trusted.

Encryption is the conversion of data into a form, called a ciphertext( unreadable text), that cannot be easily understood by unauthorized people (hackers). Decryption is the process of converting encrypted data back into its original form, so it can be understood.

Encryption takes place when you send data in a wireless communication.

The hackers can easily capture data when sent through http (hypertext transfer protocol) but not with https.

• Don’t ever forget to log out from any site after your transactions

When I was using the cafe for my online activities, most people leave the relevant sites they visited open even people who do online banking.

Log out and patiently wait for a confirmation and close the window. Most sites have two steps of logging out. You will complete the two processes if you are using a public computer.

Go the extra mile of deleting your internet activities from the public computer by going to history bar.

• Suspect Every Website as a Scam site

Precaution is better than cure. Recently, the Executive Director of my company-FirstCall received a text message that she has won one million in the MTN win-as-you-recharge promo with the instruction to visit

The MTN website to input her details to claim her money. Incidentally, she uses an MTN line and recharges her phone regularly.

She came to my Boss in my presence and we went to the site which looked exactly as the MTN site. But my suspicion rose when they demanded for her ATM card pin number after her account number and other personal details.

Immediately, I advised her to stop that this is scam because the scammers spoofed (Spoofing is the creation of TCP/IP packets using somebody else's IP address) the MTN website which was what she accessed. I checked the padlock icon at the right bottom corner of the browser to check the certificate issued to the website from the appropriate Body and discovered it was fake.

• Never open any mail you suspect as a scam
  

Don’t be in a hurry to open every mail in your box. Check the source. Most of these mails are attached to computer virus that could destroy your computer or steal your identity details and forward same to scammers.

• Get good anti-virus software and update same accordingly

New viruses are being thrown into the net daily. That’s the means of livelihood of some people online.

It is good to get a good anti-virus especially when you exchange flash drives with people.

You can view the 2008 Anti-virus Software Review before you decide on which anti-virus software to buy.

The review has information on ratings as per ease of use,effetiveness,ease of installation,help/support, features, scanning capabilities,updates etc.