Tech-knowledgably

It does not matter who sends the first SMS. What matters is that, what follows after you send that one SMS! The bomb squad team gets into action 8212; people start evacuating the area 8212; a large crowd gathers leaving roads choc-o-bloc 8212; making the work of the officials all the more difficult. And in the end declaring it as a bomb hoax, the squad winds up after a simple waste of 4-5 hours. All this could have been avoided only if people think a little, before clicking the SEND option on their cell phone.

Last month occurred a similar incident, when rumours of bankruptcy of a renowned private bank spread overnight across the country, with flooding SMSes as well as emails that were forwarded endlessly. This resulted in panic amongst the customers, who started withdrawing money from ATMs without crosschecking the authenticity of the so-called 8216;news8217;. And finally the bank authorities had to take several corrective measures to get the situation in control.

Technology is meant to make our lives easy. However, some forget this basic thing and use such tools for wrong purposes. Although they started with the idea of connecting people with their old pals and also make some new ones, even networking sites are not spared from this misuse. Recently a young boy was arrested by the Mumbai police on a girl8217;s complaint for allegedly forging her profile on a networking site, adding her personal details like cell phone, email address and posting indecent information.

With all this, the online chat rooms have become the most unsafe hubs. You could be a victim of a hacker. Like in the case of Swati Desai, her Google Chat id was hacked recently. 8220;One day I was casually chatting online with one of my friend. Suddenly two-three other pop-up windows opened, where my friends were questioning me about some dirty links that they received through my chat id. On probing more, I realised that my email-id has been hacked and apparently someone else was forwarding vulgar photos and links to all my friends from my account. Although I changed my password after that ugly episode, I am still a little apprehensive about chatting online,8221; says Desai.

An official from the Cyber Crime Cell in the city advices, 8220;Technology is a blessing if used in a proper way. Misuse of it makes it a nightmare. There are several reasons for the rise in cyber crime. In India, we do not use encrypted Internet, thus the network is not secure. Hacking tools are easily available; it is very easy for anyone with little expertise to crack your password. People should not have a casual approach towards their privacy of their ATM numbers, email ids and passwords.8221;

Whether it8217;s an SMS, email, Internet or chat rooms, these small things have made a big difference to our lives. It8217;s just that if good things come in small packages, they come at a price too.

Safety measures
Don8217;t use email-id in public cyber cafes
Passwords should be alphanumerical with special characters
Network should be secure
Use digital signature for banking and e-commerce
Avoid uploading photographs on any website
Don8217;t create too many email-ids