Lets Keep Secure Your Online Password
While on a business trip, you check your e-mail at the PC in your hotel’s lobby. Here’s why you shouldn’t: It’s distressingly common for public PCs in places like schools, cybercafés, trade shows, and libraries to be infected with password-stealing Trojan horses.
And since scores of casual visitors use them to log into e-mail or other services, data thieves view these PCs as an efficient source of harvestable information, which they then sell to spammers and other unsavory types.
To protect yourself from malicious software that may be lurking on a public PC, scan the machine with the portable (and free) ClamWin antivirus software, and carry your own customized (and portable) browser, office apps, IM clients, and secure file-transfer tools.
And if you have to use the machine’s own Windows installation, you’re better off running your applications from a portable drive using the excellent tools available from PortableApps.com. This site hosts dozens of apps that have been “portabilized” so that they store all temporary files, cache files, and history on the portable drive itself.
But for your own computer maybe you can use a password manager like Bruce Schneier’s Password Safe or the Portableapps.com version of the KeePass software.
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