A lot of times, we go online expecting that the world is a safe, happy go lucky kind of place where there is nothing but rainbows and butterflies. Well, maybe not quite that naively, but a lot of us are generally operating under the completely mistaken notion that the internet is a tame, safe place through which we send our data all willy nilly. All the broadband deals have given all the shady cats tons of bandwidth with which to rob people digitally. In fact, in many ways, the net is pretty much just the "wild west," in which all kinds of hackers are using extremely sophisticated software programs and other "malicious code" to steal your information if they possibly can. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the world is full of people who want to gain something by any means necessary, including harming someone else. The good news is that you have ways with which you can fight back against people like this. For one thing, you can visit sites, which have the "https" letters in front of them. If it means anything to you, those letters stand for "hyper text markup secure," which means the information gets encrypted it actually gets sent, so hackers cannot intercept it in mid-transmission. Another way you can fight back against hacking is to install software, which monitors your computer for potential viral interlopers. Two good programs which do not cost a penny and can be installed within a few minutes are Zone Alarm and Comodo Firewall Pro. Both allow you to see any time a program wants to access your internet – which is what a key stroke logger does, in order to report what keys you press (such as your pass words) back to its evil master. And just a quick note on pass words – if they are obvious to you, they are obvious to a hacker. Use letters, numbers and special characters whenever you can.