To avoid being a valid target for pvp in high, do not loot from yellow wrecks or cargo containers. As long as your Crimewatch safety is green, the game itself will prevent you from doing so, as it is a newbie protection feature.

As to be expected, setting your safety dot to red so you can attack people in high sec will make you valid to pvp once you use a weapon, which of course will also get you killed by CONCORD. This works in favor of the defender, since if somebody is trying to suicide gank you, you can freely open fire back at them if you have a weapon or drones to do so.

Another thing to consider is War Declarations. Player-made corporations and alliances can declare war on each other, which allows their members to shoot each other freely in low and high security space as if they were in null security space. Most NPC corporations (especially the ones the game puts newbies in) are immune to WarDecs, though there is a feature called Faction Warfare that puts you in NPC corps that are in war when you choose to enlist. Just like with player wars, FW means players from the opposing sides can shoot you freely and vice versa, but you also cannot enter the other side's space without the NPCs trying to kill you as well. Fortunately, CONCORD won't be one of those kill-you NPCs (unless you hit an innocent third party during a fight), but those ships that often float around the star gates will.

Don't be afraid to lose your ship; everyone who's been in the game at least a month will have lost at least one ship, especially those who do the Advanced Military career tutorial; it gives you a free ship and tells you to go lose it, because CCP wants all players to know they WILL go boom at some time. While you can use a variety of in-game tools and techniques to minimize loss, you can never truely avoid it. You may find your killers quite willing to help you learn from the deaths if you approach them in convo asking where you went wrong or how they did X thing you haven't seen before. Use the deaths as learning experiences, especially early on while your clones are dirt cheap, and you'll be a better player at the game.

As long as you are careful and alert, you can fairly survive in any space, even the potentially scary -1.0 of deep null and J-######## space. I'll give a few pointers that I learned within my first month:

1. Do not completely afk if you are mining in space less than 0.9. Not only are there players who will target miners, including a coalition in high sec called the New Order who especially hate afk miners (and anyone who doesn't pay them 10mil), but NPC pirates will spawn in mining areas of 0.8 and lower security. The lower the system security, the stronger the rats. While CONCORD will intervene if a player attacks you in high, they do nothing about the NPC pirates. High sec rats are fairly weak, but if you're totally afk, they will be able to destroy your ship, leaving your pod just sitting there. Feel free to have the in-game browser, or an out-of-game one, up so you can read about the different aspects of the game (or something else) while waiting for your mining lasers to do their thing, but make sure you can still at least hear what's going on so you can get your ship to safety or defend yourself. I lost a Venture once to a rat. Even if you aren't mining, you should avoid afking in space unless you want to (not) see when the ship goes boom, as some players and the NPCs will not care what you fly; it's a target.

2. Never use the auto pilot in low security space. That thing loves to drop you out of warp like 15km from where you're trying to go, so you have to fly to it with your regular rockets; this is called slowboating. The longer your ship is out there, the more chance for someone to come along and shoot you. If you really don't want to get shot, do not autopilot in lowsec; my first death resulted in that lesson.

3. Learn how to use the Directional Scanner - dscan for short - and use it often. This thing can tell you if there are any ships or structures in a particular direction up to a range of 14.5 AU, well beyond the limited range of your Overview list. More advanced usage of it can also get you the general range of distance that the ship in question is at, making dscan a very useful tool. This is especially necessary when in J-######## space, where you have no local channel list to tell you who is in the system with you. Dscan can help you find out if there are hostiles at an exit, or if there's already a base at some moon, or if there's a ship sitting in the middle of nowhere in a system, and in the case of J-space it can tell you if someone entered. It does have a weakness, however: it cannot detect ships that have an active cloaking device. Most of my deaths have been related to me not knowing some aspect of this tool or how to utilize it. Practice early and often.

4. Learn the offensive and defensive modules and abilities for a variety of ships, and how to fit your vessel. For example, the Venture mining frigate has +2 to warp core strength, equal to two free Warp Core Stabilizer modules, which will render it immune to a single Warp Scrambler or a pair of Warp Disruptor modules. However, it does not protect you from the interdictors' Warp Disruption Field Generator. Another example: Weapon damage types(determined by ammo) and armor/shield resistances. Fit the correct resistance modules to make the best use of your ship hull's preferred protection, and you'll be much harder to kill. Likewise, arm yourself to exploit holes in the targets' defences, and they'll go down very quickly.