Tips for staying safe online

A good rule of thumb is to never give your personal information out especially credit card details.

Always try to validate who you may be dealing with, if it seems suspicious then do not interact

There are trusted services which you can complete financial transactions with on the internet but triple check with that business verbally over the phone if you’re unsure the website or email is legitimately from them.

Application updates

Applications will often release updates, this helps to ensure new features work and interact with other computer processes at their best, it can also help patch security holes in the application.

Hardware

Hardware can also be exploited, ensure you mobile devices and computer systems are running the latest firmware, you can go to vendor support pages for support or you maybe prompted to update if automatic updates is something your device is configured to do.

Antivirus

You should have a reputable antivirus application installed on your devices and allow it to update as required.

Websites

If you’ve gone to a website and downloading something which you’re not 100% sure about then do take some caution, software which does not have a certification could be malicious 

Email attachments

If you do not know the sender and the attachment or link was not requested by your from a contact then do not click on the link or open the attachment, this is a very common method of trying to gain information or access to your machine.

Passwords

Also create a complex password for services like banking logins, PayPal or accounts which may contain sensitive information. For example, password should contain lowercase and uppercase alphabetic characters, numbers and special characters. The longer your password is the longer it can take to crack, for example 12 characters can take up to 200 years to crack with the current technology available.