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.

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.