The internet has become one of the foremost mediums for social interaction. Businesses are conducted online; people meet their prospective life partners on the net; millions of dollars are transferred from one account to another by a single click. What to believe and what not to believe? What to do if an email asks me to reply back with my bank account number? What if someone mails me saying that I can earn a million dollars by letting that person use my account to transfer oil money from some country in Africa? How do I protect my online identity?
This section explores the issue of legitimacy of online information and tries to answer these ever pertinent questions that confound every person who spends time online.  

An email from Paypal customer service asks you to confirm your user information. Thinking it to be a routine mail, you submit your account details. Although you may not have even realized it, all the cash in your account might be siphoned off even before you wake up...
Learn how to avoid getting phished and a guide on what you should do if you are caught in such a mess.

With the increasing popularity of digital cameras and steady improvement of photo editing software, photo editing and photo fakery has emerged as a popular pastime over the years. Fake photos have become so common on the internet of late that one encounters at least one of them each day, somewhere or the other on the internet.
Learn how to distinguish a fake photo from a real one.

A five million dollars, all for allowing some super-rich Nigerian “transfer” his money elsewhere using your bank account – a deal of its kind isn’t it? The sad part is that 99% chances are that you would not even get a penny of that supposed five million, instead will end up losing tens of thousands in its pursuit.
Learn to detect such mails and stay out of trouble's way.

With the coming of the digital age, passwords have become the single most important way of verifying one’s system identity (i.e. whether one is an authenticated user) and providing users with secure rights to their accounts.
Get an insight into how hackers work and also use our very own Secure Password Generator Applet using the Vigenere cipher.

Traditional newspapers and magazines are today faced with a new form of competition in the form of blogs (short for "weblogs"). What started as basically online diaries that people opened up to their friends or the whole world has now become a medium by itself, earning for itself the slightly derogatory title of "blogosphere". The question that arises is - Can we trust the content on blogs?

Phishing has become a common problem today with banks being the hardest hit. We managed to get a few minutes from Mr. Charly Ong of Citibank, Singapore to tell us how Citibank - one of the world's most reputed banks, handles phishing cases.
He also advises students on how to protect their online identities and have a safe online experience.

Computer Viruses are the digital versions of their biological counterparts. A Virus in a human body is a ‘particle’ that reproduces by infecting other human cells. This reproduction causes the cells in our body to die. A computer virus on the other hand, ‘infects’ a computer by copying itself to it, without the knowledge of the user operating it.
Learn how viruses work and how you should protect yourself from this menace.

This was a question we put forth to students in premier universities in Singapore, Indonesia and the U.S.A.
Take a look at what they had to say.

Cecil Eng Huang Chua is an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University. He received a PhD in Information Systems from Georgia State University, a Masters of Business by Research from Nanyang Technological University and both a BBA in Computer Information Systems and Economics and a Masters Certificate in Telecommunications Management from the University of Miami. Find out what he had to say about credibility of online information.

• Survey - PDF format
  We carried out a survey on people's knowledge regarding Phishing.
  Click links below to download (Right click to save Target As)
  Part 1    |     Part 2 
• Survey - Excel Sheet
  Excel sheet of the result of a survey carried out extensively using SurveyMonkey
  Click to download (Right click to save Target As)