Well, you may or many not take precautions when it comes to your private information, but what do you need to do if your computer is hacked into and/or you are the victim of a computer virus?

To continue alerting consumers of helpful tips during National Internet Safety month, we have found more helpful information from OnGuardOnline.gov.

Computer virus’ make it close to impossible to use your machine properly, so it is possible that you will need to get software that will erase your entire hard drive, forcing you to start over. This is where having a back up of your files would come in handy, however, if they were not backed up to a device other than your hard drive, you have lost that data forever and have to start over.

It is also important to alert your internet service provider that you have become a victim. If you are able to determine the internet service provider of the hacker, report the incident to that company as soon as possible. They will want to know and take action to prevent the virus from being spread or the hacker from continuing to look for victims.

Here are other helpful resources:

-You can alert the FBI at www.ic3.gov
-If you have become the victim of  internet fraud or have given out your personal information in response to a scam, inform the Federal Trade Commission at http://ftc.gov and http://ftc.gov/idtheft
-Spammers often use “phishing” emails to bait consumers into providing information in response to an email that looks like it came from a reputable company. You can forward these deceptive emails to spam@uce.gov and reportphishing@antiphishing.org

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Articles Concerning Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.