How to Protect Your Finances Online

Better

Audra Lowe: Welcome back to Better. Hi everybody. Coming up next, how to get the
wedding dress of your dreams but at a price that you can afford and we’re
also going to introduce you to the sounds of time for three but first you
know we blog, we tweet about pretty much about everything right. Well if
you do that with your finances you could definitely be putting your money
at risk so we checked in with More Magazine Feature Editor, Jen
Braunschweiger about what to watch out for and how to protect yourself
when it comes to online commerce in all in today’s More Talk.

So Jen we’re talking about protecting yourself, can you really protect
yourself and is there really a way you can protect yourself 100% when it
comes to online.

Jennifer Braunschweiger: Where people in the world still know you can’t protect
yourself 100% just like you can’t protect somebody from picking your
pocket. If you’re in a crowded space but the best thing you can do is have
a really good password. I have really come to believe that that’s the most
important thing. It should be between 10 and 14 characters. It should be a
mostly random collection of numbers, letters and symbols. It should not be
a word, it should not look like a word, it should not be a name, it should
not look like a name.

Audra: Because that’s what actually kept getting a lot of people information
stolen.

Jennifer: Yes.

Audra: To easy to figure out.

Jennifer: That’s right a lot of people you know have their pets name with the
number 0 or 1 after it and that kind of thing will get you into big trouble.

Audra: What about the antispyware protection, a lot of times you’ll see the pop
pups but most people just click out of it. How important is that when
you’re shopping or binding or paying online?

Jennifer: What you’re doing is protecting your computer. You’re protecting
malware which is software that installs itself without your permission on
your computer in order to steal information and blocking that off and yes
its very important to put that on that’s how to protect your computer.

Audra: Do not ignore it, right?

Jennifer: That’s right.

Audra: You also say that you should secure your wireless network. How easy is it
to do and how important is it to do or something like that?

Jennifer: That’s right, first you’re protecting your computer. Then you’re protecting
your network. You should look at your wireless router and make sure it
offers something called WPA2. If you have a very old router it won’t
support that and you should get a new one.

Audra: Okay because that’s inviting other people to possibly steal your
information?

Jennifer: What that means is someone could jump on your network and use that
back door to break into your computer.

Audra: Okay. Now let’s talk about the social networking sites. They’re a lot of
fun but they can also get you in a lot of trouble too. We need to pay
attention to certain things in particular.

Jennifer: That’s right the most important think is that you’re giving away huge
amount of information on those sites. You may reveal when your birthday
is, where you were born, things about your pets, remember the passwords.
All of those kinds of questions that people could use to say call your bank
and pretend to be you. It’s called pretexting and using all that information
that they’ve gleamed they could get out of the bank what your login
information is.

Audra: Credit cards and any credit card information. You’re paying your bills
online. It’s so much easier just to remember and store your information
there, should you do that not do that and when you’re typing in it
manually can someone pull that same information just as easily as if you
had at store.

Jennifer: We’re talking about two separate things really, we’re talking where should
not be storing your credit card information is on shopping sites so lets say
you really liked to go to LLBean.com a lot. The site makes very easy to
just store all that information. You really should not do that despite the
ease of it because what could happen is someone an acquaintance, a
family member could go on your computer and its alright there and they
could use your accounts.

Audra: Same thing with like utility bills things like that you would pay
automatically.

Jennifer: No, those are a little bit more protected. No one is going to go on to your
computer and pay your— exactly so banking online is slightly different
and we do really recommend that because people who bank online check
their accounts 4 times more often and they catch any problem much
quicker.

Audra: Wow what a good information thank you so much Jen, I appreciate it.

Jennifer: Thank you.

Audra: And if you want to get more details on protecting your self and other great
future ideas including fashion for grown ups check out the April Issue of
More Magazine which is on news stands now.