Here’s a sneaky trick used by many hackers: they purchase and set up a fraudulent web site that is a close misspelling of a legitimate one. Example: www.faceboook.com instead of www.facebook.com. All you have to do is accidentally fat-finger ONE letter in the URL and up pops a very legitimate-looking fake copy of the site you were trying to get to – and the login and links are full of key-logger malware and virus landmines waiting for you to click on them.

A phishing e-mail is a bogus e-mail that is carefully designed to look like a legitimate request (or attached file) from a site you trust in an effort to get you to willingly give up your login information to a particular web site or to click and download a virus.

Not too long ago, the CryptoLocker ransomware virus was all over the news, infecting over 250,000 computers in its first 100 days of release (at least that’s the number reported – the real numbers are probably MUCH higher). The threat was fairly straightforward: Pay us or we’ll delete all your data.

You’re working at your computer when all of the sudden – BAM! – you get a pop-up notification that your PC is infected with a virus and you must “click here” to run a scan or install antivirus software. This is a common scareware tactic used by hackers to get you to click and download a virus.

Thanks to powerful brute-force-attack software readily available online, hackers can try tens of millions of possible password combinations per second. For example, hacking software can guess a five-character password in under three hours. If you only use lowercase letters, it’s 11.9 seconds.