The following pieces of advice may already be known to the more savvy Internet user. We offer them to aid the casual and novice user. This advise offered here will help you take a few technical steps that will help protect your e-mail and personal computer from being hacked.

     There do exist easily accessible websites that provide addition advise and services for those Internet uses with more experience and greater need.

E-mail

1- Try to change your password periodically, as it could become known easily. Your password should consisted of eight figures, a mixture of letters and numbers. Use both capital and lower-case letters to make it more difficult to be known.

2- Do not use successive numbers or letters such as (asdfg) or (123456789)

3- Do not use a password based on personal information, such as your date of birth, your phone number, the name your street, your country, your city, or the person others know you love.

4- Do not use famous names like your favorite singer or actor or football player.

5- Open your mail account from its own page. If you use Yahoo, use only the Yahoo webpage itself. The same goes for Hotmail or any other mail service.

6- Do not open attached files unless you recognize and trust the sender. Be careful, there are some senders who will use names with letters close to the name of a person you know, changing only a letter or two

7- If you have a password that contains symbols, numbers, and letters that make it difficult to remember, do not save it in a file on your computer. Instead, write in on paper and keep it safely away from the computer.

8- Periodically empty your inbox. Do not forget to empty the trash as well. If you have messages you do not want to loose, save them to your hard disk and delete them from the inbox. This way, if your email is hacked, the problem will not be as great.

9- Do not forget to click the "sign out" button to close your e-mail. It is best, after signing out, to return to the home page and then close the browser completely.

General advice

1- When accessing a forum or a chatting page. If a window appears asking you to enter your password a second time after you click upon the link taking to you inbox, do not enter your password. False pages like this are sometimes created by people attempting to spy on e-mail.

2- Do not trust any website. Lately, the hackers have introduced wrong advices and provide the users with hacking programs and hack those users, as the beginner user might be happy for learning something new 3- Avoid downloading protection programs from the Internet

4- Do not check the tab "remember my ID" or "remember my password." This will save your password to your computer, making it easy for hackers to find your password and access your account.

5- Try to save your personal account information on a floppy disk or a CD and not on your hard disk, because many of us forget the secret question that they have to answer it in case they forgot their password.

6- Update you Anti Virus Program weekly. Turn on the spam blocking option as well.

7- Use a firewall program like zonealarm.

8- Use a program to detect "spyware" (e.g. adaware) that my have been installed on your computer with your knowledge.

9- Do not trust new Internet acquaintances. Do not be in a rush to identify yourself and reveal true information about yourself.

10- Do not send password or other important information via ordinary e-mail, encoded e-mail, or chat programs.

11- Do not open password-protected websites when using computers in public places such as net cafes without first making sure that there are no monitoring programs. When you are finished, be sure that you delete all the information you may have entered.

12- There are many ways to detect the presence of spy-ware. Though each spy-ware program is unique, there do exist general ways to disable such programs if they exist. Here is one way:

First, search the setup folder. Select the Start menu, click Run, and type "Regedit." In the new window, click the folders in the following order: HKEY - LOCAL - MACHINE- Software-Microsoft - Windows - Currentversion - Run
When you open this last file, you will find the names of the files that indicate the presence of spy-ware on you computer. Typically, the name of this file is strange and not included under a specific program. The name usually ends with .exe. For example: patch.exe, fast.exe or explo23.exe After you find the file, delete it from the windows folder. If you find nothing, search in the System folder inside the windows folder. Do not forget to restart you computer after erasing the file

13. If you are not able to access and delete files stored in the recycle bin, select the contents of a file, delete them and paste in other content that does not contain important information. Then save these changes to the file and delete it.

We hope that this advice will prove to be helpful to ordinary computer users in protecting their privacy and safety.