Online Security : Are you at risk ?

Filed in archive Web 2.0 on January 26, 2007

When working and/or doing business online, how secure is your data ? And how secure are your transactions ? How do you know your identity is not stolen, or your bankaccounts emptied ?

I must be what they call an early adopter of online transactions. All of my bank transactions have been online for many years. I have been buying stuff from the net using credit cards for even more years now, and I have even done a lot of business online. And in the last couple of years, I have adopted a lot of webbased applications including office suites and data storage. What are the risks ? Well, it depends. First of all, I don't keep any sensitive information online. Period. I carry it around on a USB stick or it lives in my macbook, encrypted. As far as I can judge, my bank is pretty secure, although everything can be compromised. But the risk is not in banking I think, credit card numbers are much more vulnerable than bank transactions. In order to process bank transactions, you need a physical bank card, a card reader and generated codes are exchanged between me (card reader) and the website. Whenever you buy stuff online using a creditcard, your card's number could potentially be intercepted, and, abused.

Yesterday I touched the subject of security in data storage. If you use online storage, how do you know it's secure ? Well, you don't. That's where companies like Omnidrive come in. Omnidrive promises secure data storage by usage of secured software, but a big part of security is in the way you handle your data and software. And then there is a big problem within several computer operating systems, for instance, MS Windows caches almost everything you do, leaving a big wormhole.


To be continued.