Staying safe online

With Christmas not too far away we wanted to share some top safety tips:

1. Think twice, click once
As the Christmas offers start stacking up in your inbox, it’s easy to forget that not all emails bring festive cheer.

Most hacks start by convincing you to open an attachment or visit a link to download something. It’s an easy way for hackers to install malware onto your machine.

Think twice, click once. If something is unexpected, don’t trust it – delete it.

2. Make sure the shop site is secure
If you’re shopping online, you can protect yourself further by only shopping on sites with HTTPS at the start of the web address and a padlock icon close by. The ‘S’ in HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. This tells you communications  between your browser and the website are encrypted.

3. Avoid putting personal info on social media
Personal info that you put on social media can be used by hackers to help them crack passwords and work their way into your confidence for scams.

Consider setting your social media profiles so that only friends can see what you put online.

4. Use complex passwords for each account
When choosing a password, use a mixture of capital letters, lower-case letters, numbers and special characters to make passwords much harder for hackers to crack.

Received a suspicious message?
You can help the government track and stop cyber criminals by sending suspicious emails to:  report@phishing.gov.uk