Financial transactions can now be done on the Internet.  This is especially true in Panama Banks and for people with off shore bank accounts in other tax havens like Belize, Bahamas, Switzerland (swiss) and the cayman islands. People purchase items and supplies online.  Long queues in banks are now a thing of the past.  People can pay their bills, do banking online and emails are read and sent through the quickest route possible.  However, while in the process of doing these transactions, people can be vulnerable to privacy attacks and violations my hackers.

The IP Address:

An IP address is usually assigned to a computer every time it connects to the Internet.  It works something like a temporary ID. Whenever a person connects to the Internet, they would need to subscribe to an Internet Service Provider or ISP.  When a computer is used to go online, information is exchanged between servers and other computers.  With every piece of information exchanged over the Internet, the ISP creates a log of all activities done by your computer online.  These data are retained for about two years in the ISP logs.  What this means simply is that the ISP keeps a record of all websites you’ve visited including banks auction sites or anything. We see a loophole here that needs to be plugged to make financial transactions done online be more secure for any individual to use. 

The Solution-Anonymity:

With the assistance of internet security experts, Internet access and activities can now be encrypted into unintelligible data to protect a person’s privacy.  A person can now use an anonymous internet provider which keeps log files in encrypted format so that a regular person will not be able to read them.  Techniques such as these are now used in various Panama Banks to help individuals with their transactions.

What happens is that in addition to connecting to the Internet as one would normally do, they would then have to connect to the anonymization server with their designated passwords.  Every time a person logs in to this server, it would cover the activities done by the person online including the websites he went to, files he downloaded, emails that were sent and received, etc.  Instead, what the ISP would see is not the specifics of the activity, but only the time the person connected to the internet, how long he stayed connected, and the amount of data exchanged online.

With the anonymization server, the real IP address is masked and what the ISP will see instead is the IP address for the anonymization server.  When a person visits a website, the website captures the IP address of the server and not the user’s real IP address.

One should not wait for their computers to be hacked.  Extra precaution will most certainly do you more good than harm.