There is no reason to feel insecure about online shopping this Holiday season. With a little research and by following these tips, you can be comfortable that your finances will be secure and your personal information will not be compromised. Here are six simple tips to help keep safe while shopping online:

Many parents with children have now ushered them back to high school or college with new books, pencils, backpacks, and computers. Like other tools students use to grow their academic and social lives, computers are critical to success. However, unlike other tools, if a computer's security is compromised the results can be disastrous to students and parents alike.

Students are often targeted by identity thieves, and hackers because of the low security threshold most schools maintain. Because the priority is maintaining an open environment to give Internet users as much freedom of access as possible, public institutions inadvertently provide opportunity for threats to develop into malicious attacks.

Cyber criminals are considering new strategies for lining their pockets by selling your personal informaion.

A paper from IBM Corp. shows a big drop in the volume of "phishing" e-mails, in which sham artists send what looks like a legitimate message from a banking concern or some other company. If the recipients click on a link in a phishing e-mail, they land on a rogue Web site that captures their passwords, account numbers or any other information they might enter.

Small Business owners should know that crooks are changing the types of businesses they attack with phishing. Sixty-six percent of phishing marks were banks, down from 90 percent last year. Meanwhile, companies that manage online payments, like PayPal, are being mimicked in phishing messages more frequently.