Online safety advice for families is usually either terrifying or useless. This is neither. Four things, in order of how much they matter.
1. Stop reusing passwords
This is the one that actually matters. When a website you signed up to years ago gets breached, attackers take the email addresses and passwords and try them everywhere else. If your email password is the same one you used on that forum in 2016, they now have your email — and from your email they can reset everything else you own.
The fix: a password manager. Every device has one built in now (iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager) and there are excellent standalone ones. You remember one strong password; it remembers the other two hundred, and they are all different.
If you do nothing else on this list, do this one.
2. Turn on two-factor authentication for your email
Your email account is the master key to your entire online life — every password reset goes there. Two-factor authentication means a stolen password alone is not enough to get in.
Turn it on for your email first, then your bank, then social media. It takes about two minutes per account. Use an authenticator app rather than text messages if you have the option.
3. Learn the shape of a scam
Scams have moved on from badly spelled emails. What has not changed is the psychology, and the pattern is always one of these:
- Urgency. Act now, today, or something bad happens.
- Authority. It appears to be from your bank, HMRC, the Post Office, Royal Mail, your energy supplier.
- An unexpected windfall or an unexpected penalty.
- A request to move money, or to install software so someone can “help” you.
The rule that beats nearly all of it: never act on a link or a phone number contained in the message itself. If “your bank” calls, hang up and ring the number on the back of your card. A real bank will never mind.
Teach this to older relatives, too. Phone scams targeting the elderly are relentless around here, and the “hang up and ring back” rule is the one that works.
4. Set the children’s devices up once, properly
- Use Family Sharing (Apple) or Family Link (Google) to set age limits and approve app downloads.
- Turn on your broadband provider’s free parental controls at the router — it covers every device in the house.
- Keep devices charging somewhere other than the bedroom overnight.
- Have the conversation about the fact that people online are not always who they say they are, and that they will never be in trouble for telling you something has gone wrong. That last part matters more than any setting.
Running a business from home?
The stakes and the tools are different — see cyber security and Cyber Essentials.
Worried about a device, or think you have been scammed?
Bring it in. We will check it over, clear anything malicious, and set it up so it does not happen again.
Apollo Technology, 1–2 Ludlow Court, Frome Road, Radstock, BA3 3FX. Open weekdays 8.30am–5pm. Call 01761 347198.