A few useful tips from Safer Internet Day

Every February, the UK Safer Internet Centre hosts Safer Internet Day to help highlight the importance of being safe online and address new and emerging issues and concerns. 

With the amount of time we're spending online increasing, this awareness has never been more important so here are a few of the essential tips.

Online Safety: Some of the basics

To find out more about staying safe online, a good place start would be the University's Online Safety Tips page. There you'll find lots of useful information and advice about good practice, how to report incidents, access training and much more!

Generally though, there are a few basics that are worth noting:

✅ Keep your device operating system, software and apps updated to the latest version.

✅ Invest in good antivirus software.

✅ Most operating systems come with a comprehensive set of privacy and safety settings. Familiarise yourself with them and make sure you are fully protected.

✅ Choose strong passwords using a mix of letters, characters and numbers. No more 'password 123'!

✅ Use Two-Factor Authentication where available.

✅ Only visit reputable and trusted websites.

✅ Before making purchases, ensure that the site is using a safe, encrypted connection. This is usually identified with a URL beginning with 'https://' or a visible padlock icon.

✅ Keep your data backed up.

✅ Invest in a good virtual private network (VPN) to help make your connection more secure.

✅ Educate yourself in artificial intelligence (AI) to learn about the implications, both positive and negative of the technology.

✅ Take advantage of 'screen time' apps to ensure that your time online isn't becoming excessive.

Protecting your personal data

With many people now active on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, Snapchat, Facebook, on messenger apps like WhatsApp and Messenger, or in one of the innumerable online communities, the opportunities for personal or private information to leak into the public sphere are now endless. 

Despite multiple TV series, films and documentaries (YOU, Catfish, The Beekeeper) now exploring the impact and costs of oversharing online, we all still make very basic errors that could potentially cause us a lot of problems. 

Barclays Bank highlighted this in a recent advert which showed you how easy it was for online fraudsters to gain someone's information just from their Instagram page. Posting a photo on your birthday with '#birthday' caption, and tagging your location when you're home for Christmas are just a few careless mistakes we all make.

Staying ahead of the scammers

Thankfully, by keeping up to date with your online security and taking a few extra precautions, you should be able to avoid any negative outcomes:

❌ Don’t post personal information online such as your address, email address or mobile number.

✅ Think carefully before posting pictures or videos of yourself because once you’ve put a picture of yourself online it isn't just yours anymore.

❌ Never give out your passwords! It's worth mentioning that an 8 character password with only upper and lowercase letters could take a hacker just 28 seconds to guess, so make it tricky.

✅ Think carefully about what you say before you post something online. You never know it could come back to bite you. Just think about the number of celebrities this has happened to.

❌ Don’t befriend people you don’t know. You wouldn't start speaking to random people in the street and tell them things about yourself so why do it online?

✅ Remember that not everyone online is who they say they are. Thanks to AI and bots, they may not even be a real person so be very careful on who you spend time engaging with.

Have a look at your online activity and social media accounts to see what information is on there - you may be surprised!