Safer Cyber Day 9th Feb

 

Neighbourhood Watch Message Safe Cyber Advice and Information Top tips for young people and for you We are supporting the UK Safer Internet Centre with their campaign ‘together for a better internet’. Now more than ever, we are relying on the internet to learn, work and socialise, so it’s vital that we, and the young people we care for, know how to do this safely. Please find below some tips for young people that we encourage you to share; we’ve also included some helpful guidance on how to keep yourself (and your private information) safe. Our top tips for parents and carers: Communicate regularly with your young people around what they’re doing online and make sure they know they can come to you if they are scared or worried about something they’ve seen online If your child does come to you with a problem, think carefully before taking their devices away. Worrying that their devices will be confiscated may stop them from approaching you if they experience any further issues Social media can impact young people’s mental health in a negative way – make sure they know and remember that social media is a heavily edited space with people often only posting the good things in their lives so we should avoid comparing our lives and ourselves to things we see online. Always check the age rating of apps and games before allowing your children to play them – many social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are not suitable for young people under the age of 13 Teach your children the importance of privacy settings and keeping their personal information, such as their full name, where they live, or where they go to school, private If your child uses Snapchat, make sure their Snapmaps is on ‘Ghost Mode’ or that their location is only visible to people you are happy to know the location of your child, such as you or other family members For further advice: https://www.internetmatters.org/advice/                          and https://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-centre   Our top tips for you Passwords – make sure you’re using long and strong passwords for your accounts. To create a long, strong password, you can put Three Random Words together and you can use a Password Manager app or service to store your passwords securely. It is very important that you use a different password for each account you have, so if one account becomes compromised, your other accounts are safe. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) – this sits alongside your password to provide an extra layer of security to prevent others from logging into your accounts without your permission. It means anyone logging into your account will need both your password and another form of authentication, such as a code sent to or generated by your mobile phone. 2FA is available for most social media platforms, email providers and other online services. Step-by-step guidance for turning this on can be found at www.authy.com Back Ups – if your device gets lost, stolen or broken, are your files backed up? We recommend backing up any data that is important to you, including files, photos and videos so, should the worse happen, your files and memories are safe. You can back data up to the Cloud, or to physical devices like external hard drives, but always make sure these are disconnected once you’ve backed your data up to avoid it becoming infected with malicious software if your device does. Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware – these protect your devices from becoming infected with malicious software, such as viruses. They should be used on laptops, computers, tablets and mobile phones to keep your devices and your information safe. Phishing Awareness – phishing is the term given to attempts to defraud people either by phone, email or text message. Phishing attempts generally try to make people think something good will happen (like winning a free prize, or a tax rebate), or that something very bad will happen unless they take action (like being arrested or subject to legal proceeding, or having their services cut off). Our top tip for Phishing is to Take Five before taking any action and scrutinise the message in great detail: Look at the sender’s email address, does it look right? Are you being asked to take immediate action like providing personal or financial information, making a payment or moving or transferring money? For texts and emails, are there links within the message and do they look genuine? Avoid clicking on them if you think the email could be a phishing attempt Verify that the email or text is genuine by another means, e.g. calling the company or organisation the email claims to be from, but make sure you find the genuine number as opposed to any numbers provided on the suspected phishing attempt Report suspected phishing emails to report@phishing.gov.uk and forward suspected phishing texts to 7726 This is the end of the message, Thank You and Please Stay Safe

Message Sent By Simon Bailey (Police, Neighbourhood Watch Officer, Glouce)