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Old 05-08-2009, 10:00 AM
collectbaseball collectbaseball is offline
Dan McCarthy
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Brighton, MA
Posts: 216
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Honestly if someone has your ip address it isn't too big of a deal... you can also change your ip address with relative ease. They can be hidden via proxies. Also, use a firewall.

Additionally, copy and pasting a password into a password field actually may be less secure. Doing so would mean the password is in your clipboard and unless you clear that out after every instance, it would probably be more obvious. Keyloggers aren't incredibly common means of password-stealing anyway, I don't think. Generally it's more brute force I believe.

If you get an email from eBay/PayPal/your bank, PAY ATTENTION. Do not click through links in the email and enter your username and password. It is much more likely that a "hacker" is going to get your password through a phishing email than by someone breaking into your system, placing a keylogger, and monitoring it. If you are unsure if an email is legitimate or not, go to the institution's website an log in through that. If there is really a problem with your account, it will probably tell you there. Alternatively, call the bank/whoever and ask if it is real.

Spybot Search and Destroy and CCleaner are great programs. Firefox is a more secure browser than internet explorer. You can also add extensions to it to block potentially malicious things embedded in websites. Finally, just because you are using a Mac don't be stupid (this is coming from a Mac user). Any computer can be hacked, and you should always be careful. Just because you're driving a car with a five-star crash test rating doesn't mean that you should drive more recklessly or that you won't get killed in a car accident, despite whatever precautions you may take.
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