Internet Safety: What You Need to Know

Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash

No internet user hasn’t heard anything about online or Internet safety. It’s also often referred to as cybersecurity. 90% of Internet users know about it and are aware of its importance but still neglect even the basic rules. But it continues up to the moment they face frauds and suffer from their activity. We want to draw more attention to this problem and, therefore, we decided to gather all the important tips on staying safe on the Internet and post them here. On the whole, Internet safety should become a full-fledged subject in school and college curricula since modern children start to interact with it from early childhood. 

But instead of it, we observe a completely different picture: students are forced to study the subject that isn’t necessary for them, and, moreover, they spend their precious time completing difficult assignments. Fortunately, most of them started to understand how much time they waste on it and prefer to order help from professional coursework service. And those students who lack knowledge of Internet safety often lose their money when trying to find an academic helper. 

The following information will be useful both for new and experienced Internet users. Do you like spending time online? Learn how to protect yourself.

1. Avoid public WiFi

How often do you connect to Wi-Fi networks in cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, and other public places you visit? We are sure you do it each time, but you’ll stop doing it without proper safety measures after checking this information. Public Wi-Fi is a fertile ground for hackers and frauds because there’s no need for authentication for connection. Hackers use public Wi-Fi hotspots to do everything they want and get access to all your information. If you use public Wi-Fi, you can easily get malware to any of your devices and lose confidential information. That’s why you mustn’t use public Wi-Fi hotspots without a VPN. It’s one of the basic measures that can protect you from dangers.

2. Change your passwords

The biggest fear of all Internet users is to forget the password from the important service. What do we do to avoid it? Of course, set the same combination for all websites we use. And we don’t even imagine that the fraud who managed to hack one service we use immediately gets access to all others. If you see that it’s about you, immediately change your passwords. There’s no need to have a vivid imagination to create a strong password since there are many good password generators. Moreover, password managers let you keep all of them in one safe place and get access to them from any device. If you think you have no problems with passwords, so there’s no need to change them, you’re deeply mistaken.

3. Be attentive to what you post

Social media became an irreplaceable part of our lives, and we used to share everything that happens to us there. But how can we be sure that no one monitors us and means to harm us? We understand that you may want to share your positive emotions with friends to let them be happy for you, but please, do it in private messages. Get rid of the habit of putting the location marks on your photos, and keep important information secret. The rule that the more people know about you, the better doesn’t work here. Some people oppose it and state that they can delete the post at any time, but they forget one important detail: it’s impossible to delete something from the Internet. 

4. Shop on reliable sites

We can’t live without using the benefits of online shopping, so there’s no point in prohibiting it, especially since there are a lot of online stores that have a perfect reputation and implemented good security measures. However, if you plan to order something and want to pay online, we want you to be careful. The easiest way to identify a reliable service is to look at the address bar. Trustworthy sites usually use the HTTPS protocol and have the padlock sign. However, it’s not a 100% guarantee of safety. Carve out some time to find the reviews of this online store. If some people had trouble with it, you’ll quickly find this information. Usually, unreliable services try to delete all negative reviews, but we’ve already mentioned that the Internet has no ‘Delete’ button.

5. Always keep your antivirus enabled. 

Do you purchase licensed antivirus software? We think you don’t because the statistics show that most Internet users prefer downloading free ineffective programs or use hacked software. The latter option seems weird alone. Malware can do a lot of harm to your mobile phone or computer, and some of them are almost impossible to destroy. Besides the fact you should use only licensed software, you have to keep all programs updated. Hackers continue to progress and develop malware that is difficult to detect. If you forget to enable and update your antivirus software, you risk losing access to your device at all.