how to be safe at Cyber Cafes?

What if you are on vacation and you need to send an important email to your boss, you don’t have any internet source with you?. you would probably go to some nearest cyber cafe around you. right?. But wait do you feel safe to login to your email account from that cyber cafe. are you so sure that nothing will happen with your email account after you leave the cyber cafe?. No you should not. you can be the victim of some spam, or any other kind of scam. the owner of the cyber cafe can spy on you using various ways.

one such way is, he might have installed a keylogger on all the computers in his cafe. and the moment you enter your private data, the keylogger captures all the data entered by you. This includes your name,address,credit card numbers,phone numbers or even your login information.

#Trick 1
one such trick is to use “onscreen keyboard”. but sometimes some virus or keylogger can disable onscreen keyboard. in this case we will use the below trick:-

#Trick 2
This trick of cheating keylogger involves confusing the logger with random keystrokes.

Suppose you want to login to “yahoo.com” with the below login details:

Username- ashwin
Password- babygirl

Now just open “notepad” and enter your password along with some random characters in between as shown below:

now just copy and paste the relevant characters(password) into login box using “mouse” and login into your account. this is the safest trick to bypass the keyloggers installed in cybercafes. However you can remove the keyloggers installed on your personal comp.

Some other tips to be safe at cyber cafes:

1) Whenever you go to Cyber cafe, make sure that all the PC’s are upto date with latest Antivirus and Antispyware programs. these will help to keep away Trojans.

2) Next precaution is to turnoff Auto complete option in “Internet Explorer”
just follow these steps:
open “IE” and Goto Internet Options >> content Tab >> AutoComplete >> uncheck ‘forms’ and ‘usernames-passwords’.

In Firefox Goto >> tools >> Options >> Security >> Password >> uncheck remember passwords.

3) Always make sure you logout properly when using messenger software.

In Yahoo messenger always disable “Archiving” of messages as test files. this helps in keeping conversations private. to do this “Goto Yahoo messenger Preferences >> Archive >> check on clear when i sign out“.

With these security tips you’ll be 90% safe at cyber cafes.