These 12 scams of Christmas from McAfee and published on CNet are a good review and practice for all of us.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10403100-238.html?tag=mncol;title

2.  Beef up Your Password

Sometimes setting passwords and remember them is one of the harder things we do, but it is one of the most important thing we do.  Protecting our personal information from cyber predators is critical in keeping our identity secure.  I suggest using strong passwords.  You don’t need 500 individual passwords, you just need a few that are good.  Here are a few rules to follow:

• Use letters and numbers from a phrase that is meaningful to you.
• Add special characters.
• Mix upper case characters with lower case characters.
• If you don’t us the first or last characters of the phase it is harder to break. Develop your own formula.  Remember the formula and the phase.
• It should always be at least 7 characters, but longer is better.

Here is an example (for your safety be original. Don’t use this example)

• Phase: “I always forget my stinking password”
• Formula is:
• exchange the character I for !,
• Use 2nd letter of words in phase.
• Capitalize odd letters (1st, 3rd, 5th…).
• There are 22 characters in the phase. I’m using the numbers of the total after every 2nd word.

Password:  !Lo2Yt2A – (Use any formula you like, just remember your formula).

This may seem complicated, but if you become consistent you will remember it very easily. Just be careful to not make it so complicated that you spend most of your waking hours resetting your passwords, because you will start to get lazy and make your passwords to easy for you to remember (i.e. password1) and it will be easy for someone to hack.

3.   Search and expand your education on Security

There are many websites where you can expand your security knowledge.  Let me give you a few, but feel free to search the web for others.

• Security Dark Reading
• Consumer Report Online Security Guide
• National Cyber Security Alliance
• Online Security Author
• Yahoo Security Center

There are many others. 

_____________________________

 So give yourself the gift of security for Christmas and add it to your New Years resolution list. 

Merry Christmas to all of you and Happy New Year. 

Make it a safe and successful 2010.