Identity Frauds through Phishing Emails are growing by each passing day. More and more Internet users are getting scammed and losing their privacy and money to these scams.

And many times, it is due to some careless online behavior from the user itself, which is responsible for him to be a victim. A few careful steps can help you great deal to identify and prevent falling in the trap.

One of the common way to trap innocent users is to send fake emails looking to be from a genuine source like Paypal, Ebay or your Bank. Often a careful look at the email for the sign of phishing might help you to identify and avoid phishing emails. But due to the lack of knowledge and carelessness people ignore to remain cautious and get trapped.

Iconix – A Handy Way to Identify and Avoid Phishing Emails

Iconix is a freeware plugin, which when installed, gets seamless integrated with most of the Email clients and checks the original source of the emails. If the email is coming from a popular financial institution or website, which are often targeted by the phishing scammers, then a lock icon along with the tick mark appear before the sender’s name. This identifies that the source of the email is genuine.

If you want more details about this, then you can click on the icon, which will open a TrueMark Certificate verifying the source of the email.

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We just carried a post on how to make your Hotmail account more secured by ensuring that your Hotmail Password gets expired after every 72 hours. There is yet another way to make your Homail account still more secure by ensuring to use encrypted SSL login to your Hotmail account. Google has introduced this early in its GMail last year.

You have to click the link “Use Enhanced Security (SSL)” at the bottom to use this feature. Based upon your cookie settings, this option will be stored, and the next time when you login, this feature will be automatically selected.

You can turn it off any time, by clicking “Turn Off Enhanced Security (SSL)” option, if you think that it is slowing down your browser speed. But I strongly recommend you to use this feature to protect your Hotmail Login.

Even with the popularity of the Email services like Yahoo and GMail dominating the web-based email service marketplace, Hotmail is still used by plenty of users worldwide.

To make its services more secured, Hotmail has now allowed its users to let their passwords expire after 72 hours, if they opt for it. This may sound as added hassles for many of the users, but if you are really concerned about the security of the passwords, then this is for you. Opting this option, will require you to reset your password after 72 hours.

You can use this link to use this hotmail security feature.

If you want to hide your important secret files and folders so as to send them to somebody confidentially, then one way is to wrap them in an .exe container locker with a password. The recipient will have to unlock them with the help of the password to access the files contained within the EXE container.

There is a freeware utility called ProtectMe, which can be used to hide, store and protect your important files under EXE cover.

Protect Me! 2010 creates secure executable (.exe) container files to which you can add any files and directories you want to! Your files will be stored securely inside the container file.

To ensure a maximum of security, Protect Me! 2010 uses SHA1 for password validation and AES for encryption.

This is a freeware utility and works on all presently used versions of Windows.

[Download ProtectMe]

Domain Name Server, termed as DNS in short, are servers with a specialized task of translation (resolution) of humanly memorable domain names and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, the second principle Internet name space, used to identify and locate computer systems and resources on the Internet.

DNS Servers allow the Internet to go human-friendly and increase its usability. They are generally maintained by your ISP’s although there are public DNS server applications like OpenDNS and Google’s Public DNS as well.

How to Change the DNS Server IP Address Settings

You have to go deep down to your Windows settings and change the IP address settings in the TCP/IP Protocol settings of your network connection every time you want to switch your DNS Server settings. With so many useful DNS services available today, it sometimes becomes difficult to manually change them as it is also difficult to memorize them all.

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Although I am not a big fan of system optimization tools and applications, I am presenting here a good opportunity to get a full licensed and legal copy of the WinUtilities Pro suite absolutely free.

WinUtilities Pro is a Windows Repair, Optimization and SpeedUp tool, with a regular price of $49.99. But they are giving it away absolutely free for the Softpedia users at present.

You just have to download the trial version from the softpedia site , and use the following credentials to register it.

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