Computer use has soared over the past decade and more and more of us are using our PC’s for storing personal data as well as accessing our banks, [tag]shopping online[/tag] and downloading movies and music. What some of us don’t realize is that almost everything you store on your computer is accessible by anyone with the know-how, even if it is password encoded. It’s time for us to get wise and protect ourselves and our data by taking precautions and preventing the possibility of [tag]identity theft[/tag] happening to you.

Back in the day…

Let me tell you a little story. Many years ago, I worked for a large public utility. In those days, personal computers were just beginning to show up in the workplace, and my boss had an IBM PS2 personal computer that we used to use to play games. I was a novice computer user at that time, but knew my way around MS-DOS a little. I was doing some personal stuff on the computer, but didn’t want to leave it for others to view so I typed in the delete command, del *.*.

My mistake was that I did this in the root directory so it deleted all the system files and the computer would no longer start any of the programs. Panicked, I phoned a friend. Lucky for me, I was on the night shift so I had a few hours to spend trying to sort out the problem before the boss came in.

My friend was a computer hardware engineer. About an hour after I called him, he arrived with his box of disks. I told him what I had done, and begged him to help me sort it out. “No problem”, he said, “I will try to recover the files”. Lo and behold, he typed in a few keystrokes and within 5 minutes, he had the machine back up and running as if it had never had a problem. What did he do? He un-deleted the files.

Imagine my astonishment, because he knew how, he could recover all the data I thought was lost forever. This is a salient point. Although you think you may have thrown something into the recycle bin or the trash, doesn’t mean that it cannot be retrieved by someone who know’s what they are doing.

Can you think about the files you have deleted from your computer? Do they contain bank account details? Passwords or other information that can be used to steal your identity? What about the websites that you visit. Do you know that the sites you view using your computer are stored in places you may not even know about?

How can you protect yourself?

By using software that cleans up your hard drive, removing items that need to be kept confidential. This type of software scans your drives for adware, spyware and other information gathering devices and much more. It is not enough to simply delete files from your recycle bin, Temporary Internet Folder or your browser history to be safe. Software may look more sophisticated that it did 20 years ago, but the same basic principles apply. Someone else using the right tools and with the right know how, once they get access to the computer, can simply restore these files without much trouble.

Protect yourself. Read more about securing the data stored on your PC and download a product that can help you [tag]safeguard your personal information[/tag]