The sanctuary of safe surfing may seem like a distant dream. Every day brings either a new threat or a new and more creative version of an old scam. Thieves have good reason to be more creative – technology is getting better at stopping scams, law enforcement is better at identifying culprits, and consumers (at least some of them) are becoming more aware and less likely to be fooled by the same-ole-same-ole.

But another reason thieves are becoming more creative is because there’s a lot of money at stake. More consumers, more high speed internet connections, more credit cards and more online stores means lots more business opportunities.

Security experts that track hackers and identity thieves regularly reports online stashes containing credit card information worth millions – information that’s being offered for sale on the hacker black market.

It’s no wonder we don’t seem to be making much headway on many security fronts. The number of identity theft victims annually seems to have leveled off lately, and may even be falling. That could be because victims are not coming forward as much because their credit card companies or banks have reimbursed them fully for any losses and therefore they don’t see themselves as victims. But someone’s paying for all that zero-liability and it’s usually folks like you and me.

But while the battle rages on, there are still plenty of things you can do to stay safe online.

One of the most important things you can do is keep up-to-date with patching your browser. Patches are essentially repairs to fix recently discovered vulnerabilities. Hackers and identity thieves are very quick to develop and deploy tricks to exploit these vulnerabilities, and if you visit an infected web site with a vulnerable browser, these sites can infect your computer with everything from bots and Trojans to password-stealing keyloggers and spyware.

All good browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox make it easy to have your browser automatically check for and install any new patches.

Bogus and pharming web sites are also on the rise, and many of them simply take advantage of busy users who mistype a url into their browser. Hackers are known to register thousands of domains with similar spelling to popular web sites and users who accidentally mistype a url may end up on a password stealing web site that looks identical to their bank web site.

And whether you surf from home, from work, or from your favorite coffee shop, make sure you keep to a minimum any personal or sensitive information on your computer.

There are so many ways thieves can access your hard drive, the best protection is to have as little valuable information as possible on your computer.