Cyber Safety Starts at Home

Mike Hudson How-To's, Security

Cyber Safety Starts at Home

This weeks focus of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is the importance of Cyber Safety in your own home. It’s a good idea to instil Cyber Safety in your everyday life. As part of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month StaySafeOnline have published a handy infographic Cyber Safety Starts at Home

Below are some suggestions around things you can do to ensure you’re Cyber Safe at Home

Keep a clean machine

Regardless of if you use Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X or one of the many flavours of Linux it is important you ensure you keep up to date with any updates available for either the operating system or the applications installed on it.

Keep out malware

There are a wide range of AntiVirus products on the market, ranging from free to pay for applications. Some even with subscriptions. One I generally tend to suggest to my friends and family is Sophos Home which is completely free to use in the home environment.

Lock down your login

Two-factor authentication is a good place to start with securing your online accounts

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is an additional layer of protection beyond your password. It significantly decreases the risk of a hacker accessing your online accounts by combining your password (something you know) with a second factor, like your mobile phone (something you have). Many of the world’s largest websites have made 2FA readily available from the security settings of your online accounts, but it’s up to you to turn on this free feature. This ultimate guide will help you Turn It On and keep hackers out.

There’s a good collection of tutorials on how to enable two-factor on all your accounts over at Turn On 2FA

Share with Care

Thinking before you post is an important part of Cyber Safety. There’s a thorough guide around the do’s and dont’s around information sharing online available here

Back it up

Long gone are the days of scrabbling around for a USB drive or CD Rom to backup onto. The future is in the cloud, with one of the industry leaders being BackBlaze

Secure your WiFi Router

Michael Horowitz maintains a handy online guide on how to secure your router

Mike Hudson

Mike Hudson is a Lead Cyber Security Analyst living and working in Kingston Upon Hull. With extensive experience in Microsoft and Apple technologies, ranging from desktop OS’s to Server OS’s and hardware. By day working as part of an infrastructure team, and by night ridding the world of IT issues through blog posts..

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