Thanksgiving marks the beginning of one of the year's busiest online shopping season, including Black Friday and the record breaker Cyber Monday that last year made it to be the biggest e-commerce day ever. Experts and retailers alike predict sales to skyrocket this holiday again based on the fact that in recent years an increasingly huge number of customers chose to grab a deal from the comfort of their homes.
No surprise then that it's not only shoppers and retailers that are getting ready for the long weekend and cyber week ahead. These massive shopping booms give cybercriminals plenty of chances for easy kill and if one is not careful enough, they may end up paying a much heavier price than those willing to tolerate the pain standing in long lines brings. Families visiting relatives for Thanksgiving using their laptops in transit via unsecured WiFi connections are an especially easy target, but regular home shoppers and e-businesses are just as much in focus. Data breach, data theft, identity theft, loss of business reputation, identity fraud are just some of the consequences one may face as a result of having their, or their customers' personal and financial details hacked, so either side of the virtual counter you will be this holiday, make sure that you don't give away confidential details!
While it is true that you can Google many useful advices on how to keep your online shopping risk-free, and it is advisable to follow them, they all have an inherent vulnerability: they rely exclusively on an anti virus for protection. But it's all too easy to fall for a trick and hackers are always busy to come up with something new. If they were able to hack the systems of companies as huge as Sony Playstation, or VeriSign, than they can surely hack your PC. You should stop relying solely on an antivirus and the safety promise retailers make and need to add another layer of protection to them to guarantee your sensitive details uncompromised privacy.
The security measure we'd like to recommend you take is the regular erasure of all your online activity traces, with particular focus on traces of online shopping. While it is true that trustworthy companies do their best to treat and keep your personal and financial details as confidential as possible by offering you SSL, that is, encryption of your data between your browser and a company's server, that only protects your data once it leaves your PC. But until then you are still left with serious privacy risks to tackle.
Each time you do an online transaction your browser records entries of each page you went through to complete the purchase. Even though it doesn't reveal the details you entered, recorded pages, for instance, Amazon.com Select a Payment method alone already offer hackers plenty of clues where to start exploiting you. Especially, if you keep yourself signed in on retailer websites with all your passwords, shipping and card details saved for convenient shopping! Hackers won't even need to bother trying to crack your passwords. All they need to do is to check your history, reopen the pages where you did your shopping and they can start shopping as if they were you.
True, some PC users are in the habit of regularly deleting their history. Unfortunately, the security that guarantees is just as good as deletion in Windows is. When you wish to delete data in Windows, for instance your history, it doesn't actually get removed. It only gets marked available for overwriting, but until it doesn't get overwritten, it remains on your hard drive for hackers to recover. Just imagine, whether you are a shopper, or retailer, the array of sensitive traces you leave behind during a massive shopping season like the one we are expecting!
The only way to make sure that your confidential details stay protected is to permanently remove all your online transaction traces this holiday by using east-tec Eraser. It offers you an easy way to wipe all your history entries and transaction traces beyond recovery using government and industry standard algorithms to keep third parties away from your personal and financial data. And in case you use more than one PC, or want to give your family or friends the gift of security and privacy, please keep an eye on our special offers during this holiday.
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