When shopping online, there are many security risks to consider. While nobody is going to be stealing your purse or wallet like might happen in an actual crowded mall, you run many other risks a person in real life doesn’t have to. For example, by leaving your connection open and not making it go through some kind of encryption software or any sort of privacy software or program, a hacker could easily break in to your transaction and see what you have bought, are going to buy, or even deleted or put off of your shopping cart. Also, they could even more maliciously hack into your transaction or your account and steal your identity and credit card numbers and passwords. Many identity thefts happen on sites like these; shopping sites. The user is not protected by any sort of Internet software, and the hacker can easily break in with minimal difficulty.

Nearly every thing in life these days is password encoded. Your MySpace account, YouTube video account, Email account, Bank Account, etc. Nobody in their right minds would leave these important things containing sensitive information unsecured. This would be an identity thieves nightmare. You do in fact leave something completely unprotected each day without even realizing it; your Internet activity.

Internet activity you ask? Why is this something that needs to be secured and password protected? The truth is, hackers can intercept your transmissions from your computer and trace you right back to the source. A hacker could actually find your house through these signals, and then you’d have more than data insecurity to worry about. Imagine if your child was using the Internet and a hacker traced them back to your house! Also, these hackers can place tracking cookies on your computer and track you all around the Internet.

The internet is not the club it used to be. There are many more people using it, and some with bad intentions. It is more important than ever to be guarded online, and luckily, you don’t have to have a doctorate in Computer Sciences to do so.

One must always be wary of their ISP. The ISP has a meticulous log of all internet activity done while under them and every website has a log of every IP that visits them. By using an anonymous proxy, your ISP won’t have a log of sites you’ve visited because it won’t have been under them, and the website will log the proxy’s IP, and not yours when you visit.