Silver Surfer Online Safety

These days it’s common knowledge that we all need to ensure personal information is kept safe online, but knowing how to do this effectively isn’t as well understood. Protecting your computer from the hidden threat of an anonymous hacker, or a malicious computer virus, can be a confusing business.  The following topics cover the basics of how to best address this problem.

Passwords
The best passwords are those that can’t be easily guessed. Avoid dates of birth, family names or other information that could be worked out fairly easily. The safest passwords contain random letters, numbers and non-alpha numeric characters such *, &, “ or $. These passwords are more secure as they are harder to guess, and therefore make it harder for intruders to hack into your system.
Ensure your passwords are changed regularly – especially for online banking sites, as the longer you keep a password, the more time a hacker has to work out what it is.
Having different passwords for different sites is just the same as having different keys for different locks around the house. This means that if one password gets hacked into, loss of information is minimised.

Anti-virus software
A good quality anti-virus software program is essential so ensure you install, or get someone else to install, one on your system, and use it to scan the PC regularly every few days. You can set the program to scan your computer automatically at a certain time on a certain day, so choose a time when it is likely the machine is switched on to avoid missing this too often. There are various good quality free versions of anti-virus software available these days, so there shouldn’t be too much cost involved here.
If you find you have a virus on your computer, you can use the anti-virus software to try to remove it. If this is unsuccessful, then look online for a removal tool for the specific virus, or contact an expert and ask for their help.  Most viruses are fairly easy to remove, but some can be trickier, so it is best to ensure your computer is clean before accessing the internet to prevent the virus being passed on to others.

Firewall Software
In addition to anti-virus software, it is important that your computer has firewall software installed. Firewalls are designed to keep your computer safe from hackers by acting as a gateway that blocks unauthorised access to your computer, while still allowing data that you choose to send or receive through.

Update Regularly
Your computer is run by an operating system such as ‘Windows’. The manufacturers of these operating systems are constantly trying to protect your computer by re-writing small parts of code called patches, and offering updates to make the system more secure.  You can ensure your computer operating system is as secure as possible by automatically downloading and installing these updates from the internet.

Backup Regularly
If something does happen to your computer, you won’t lose all the information stored there if you have backed up your data on a regular basis. There are various ways to back up your computer, but one of the most straightforward is to back up to an external hard drive. An external hard drive is a simple storage device, similar to your computer’s hard drive, but not inside your computer.  When you want to back-up, you plug it into your PC and copy the data from your computer to the external hard drive so it’s safe. It is similar to safeguarding important documents by keeping another copy at someone else’s house.

For further information please visit http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/HomeAndCommunity/TechnologyInYourHome/InternetTechnologies/DG_10038607