Inside Scoop: Simple steps to safe online shopping

-Hey everyone, welcome to the Inside Scoop. I'm CNET's Kara Tsuboi joined by senior editor, Seth Rosenblatt. -Hi Kara. -Hey Seth. So now that Thanksgiving is over and the holiday shopping season has officially begun,-- -Uh-huh. -a lot of us will be online shopping of course. -Yes. -I understand that you've got some tips on how to shop safely online. -Absolutely. Or at least more safely. -Sure. -First tip is with your passwords. Change them if you haven't. Most people don't change their passwords regularly enough. -Yeah. -I recommend choosing a password that is at least 4 random words with spaces in between. -I never even knew you could have spaces between your words in your passwords. -It turns out that you can. And what that allows you to do is have a more secure password that you can remember more easily. Computer logic has a more difficult time discerning what those spaces are and so you don't really need all these, you know, characters like exclamation points, or @ marks, or whatever. Just choose something that's easy to remember and has spaces in it so there's at least 4 words or so. -Good. So, change passwords for-- -Uh-huh. -e-mail, bank account, shopping sites. -Absolutely. -Another tip? -VPN. A lot of people will have a work provided VPN. You can use that. If you don't have one of those, you can use a free VPN like Hotspot Shield or LogMeIn Hamachi and what that does is that it ecrypts your network traffic in a tunnel so it's more secure. -That's a good tip. -Uh-huh. -And what about when we're browsing various shopping sites? Which do we look for or not look for? -Absolutely. Two things I recommend when it comes to browsing is one, use 2 different browsers. Keep your mission critical information in 1 browser. Keep your shopping in another browser. -Oh. -I like to use Firefox and Chrome for that. It doesn't matter which one you use for which as long as they're separate. And the second tip is to make sure that you have HTTPS in the URL bar,-- -Uh-huh. -the location bar, and that you also see a green badge when you're on a shopping site like Amazon. -Right. Just to know it's legit and secure. -Absolutely. -And finally, when it comes to payment,-- -Uh-huh. -what method is far better than another? -Absolutely. I prefer using a credit card for my online payments because if anything goes wrong,-- -Uh-huh. -I can always get some redress from the credit card company. -Right. It's not like the money just already disappeared from your bank account. -Absolutely. -And you're out of luck. -Yeah. -Yeah. Thank you so much, Seth. -Thank you. -I appreciate the tips. -Happy Holidays. -Happy Holidays. This is Seth Rosenblatt. I'm Kara Tsuboi. Thanks for watching the Inside Scoop.