5 Tips to Help Staying Safe Online

These days most of our lives are digital: we can buy groceries without leaving home, bank online or even check our favourite clothing store to buy something to dress up. And still, we need to be so cautious when doing that. Every year millions of brits are subject to attempted online scams or hacking. Because we don’t want our customers and readers to be part of that stat, we’ve compiled a top 5 list of ways to stay safe online.

Keep your software up to date.

Having the most up to date security software, browser and operating systems are a frontline defence. With those installed and updated, viruses, malware and other online threats will have a tough time succeeding. Ah, and turn on the software automatic updates. Companies are quite swift releasing security patches and you’ll be protected against the latest detected threats!

Use a strong password.

You need to make sure that your password is strong and cannot be easily guessed. A strong password is at least a minimum of 12 characters long which include lower and uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters (and yes, those are our Internet Banking’s password requirements!).

Ensure your internet connection is secure.

Set up your Wi-Fi with a password, this will stop anyone unknown connecting to it. You should also be careful when using public Wi-Fi as to what you do whilst online as any information you enter on this Wi-Fi is not secure or private.

Only shop on secure websites.

When shopping online make sure that the websites you are visiting either have the secure lock icon next to them in the browser bar, or start with https:. These websites are marked as safe by your browser, and therefore your personal details are being entered into a secure website.

Watch out for scams.

If you receive an email that you are unsure about or looks like a scam it is important to ensure that it is real. Before proceeding to do anything with the email, such as clicking the links or entering any details or opening attachments, there are ways to assess if it’s legit:

• Check that the email address is actually from the company who has contacted you
• And you can reach out to the company to see if the email is from them. We do not recommend calling any number from said email, so it’s best to find the company’s official website and obtain their number

Staying safe online can be difficult even if you follow all these steps! That’s why being cybersecure is on top of our agenda – we even had a Protect Yourself Online webinar about it and we also regularly share tips with our customers on Social Media. So keep an eye on our blog and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles!