Protecting your family is easy with DynaRisk. As well as monitoring your home's devices, you can monitor up to five email addresses against data breaches allowing you to take the necessary steps if a family member's information is leaked or breached.
Keeping your family safe online: the essentials
Attacks on physical devices in the home are becoming increasingly common; from the 2016 baby monitor hacking scandal to NEST security cameras being hijacked, if a device is connected to the Internet, it’s a risk. Cyber criminals are constantly developing sophisticated methods to gain access to accounts in an attempt to steal information and defraud victims.
Vulnerable areas in the home
There are some particularly vulnerable areas that could leave your home open to cyber attack. Here are the top most prevalent issues...
Your home Wi-Fi router
Your router is the central hub that connects all of the devices in your home, so they are often targeted by cyber criminals. Not only do they contain a goldmine of information about you, but it’s also tricky to detect that someone has gained unauthorised access.
IoT* devices
Poorly protected Internet connected devices provide an entry point for criminals, allowing for potential ransomware attacks, data and identity theft, device takeover and more.
Lack of awareness
Does everyone in your home know how to spot a phishing email? Does each family member use unique, complex passwords for their accounts? Do you share logins with one another, and reuse credentials across multiple sites? Humans are the best defence against most cyber attacks - so good knowledge is essential.
Don’t know where to start? These are the simplest measures you can put in place
Password management
If you use the same login credentials for your bank account, Netflix, Hotmail and anything else that requires a username and password, you’re making life easy for cyber criminals. Hackers trade lists containing millions of stolen username and password combinations which are then ‘stuffed’ into hundreds of websites, granting access and allowing criminals to take over the account.
Although it may sound far fetched, 60% of people have had information stolen and traded by cyber criminals - oftentimes, they just don’t know it. If you’ve re-used a password that was stolen from one website, a hacker may be able to access multiple accounts, accessing payment information and more.
If your memory struggles to keep up with busy family life and remembering all your passwords, use a password management tool like LastPass to keep everything safe. It even has a password generator tool to assist when you can’t think of something unique.
Become a pro at recognising phishing scams
Phishing scams typically involve emails from cyber criminals hoping to trick you into parting with your money, sensitive information or even clicking on web links and attachments that contain malware. Ever received a refund or tax rebate offer out of the blue? Or a message to say that your TV license has expired? Spotting a phishing email can be difficult but here are some things to look out for…
- Check the sender’s email address. Criminals will change the sender’s name to something convincing, but if you actually look at the email address it’s usually completely unrelated to the service they are writing to you about.
- Look out for spelling mistakes. As simple as this sounds, spelling mistakes are often a key way of identifying the legitimacy of an email you have received. More often than not, phishing emails are sent from overseas where English is a second language therefore the spelling and grammar may give it away.
- The email was sent from your own account It’s very easy for cyber criminals to change the ‘from’ address to your own personal email address, making it look like phishing emails are sent from within your account. Don’t be alarmed - simply delete the email and refrain from clicking on any links.
Enable 2-step verification wherever you can
Tonnes of websites now offer an extra added layer of protection called ‘2-step verification’ or ‘2-factor authentication’. They’re both identical in the way they work and essentially allow you to authorise any login attempts - even your own. By enabling this security setting it becomes more difficult for criminals to attempt an account takeover as you would be alerted to a new login attempt. You can also remotely block a login attempt you don’t recognise.
Enable parental controls
Parental controls should be set up on mobiles and tablets, your home broadband, games consoles, home entertainment (film, music and TV) and search engines. By enabling parental controls you are protecting your children from visiting potentially upsetting or harmful content.
To get started, make a list of all the devices in your home and tackle them one by one. You may want to start with your Wi-Fi router since that is the central control point for the types of websites your children will be able to access via Internet connected devices in your home.
Ensure everyone’s social media accounts are private
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube - whatever the platform, privacy settings should be set to maximum. This will help to protect vital personal information that could be used against you in social engineering scams. It’s also important to remind anyone using social media that once something is shared in the public domain, it can be virtually impossible to control who sees or shares it with others. Don’t share anything that could be used against you.
Managing your cyber security is more simple than you think
Protecting your family’s digital footprint may seem like a challenge but it’s relatively easy once you have the basic measures in place. In the same way that we insure our homes and cars against damage, or carry out maintenance to keep everything in working order, we should also pay the same attention to protecting our digital footprints and data online.
DynaRisk can help you to stay in control and protect your family online. The DynaRisk Cyber Security Score and dashboard provides an extra layer of protection that antivirus software can't. Most of us don’t know if we are safe online or not; with a cyber security score you’ll know exactly where you stand.
Your score is calculated by assessing and monitoring over 70 risk factors, scanning your devices for vulnerabilities, checking if you've had data stolen in data breaches and asking you a few simple questions. The higher your score, the safer you are online. DynaRisk also provides alerts, advice and assistance in the event that your information has been compromised in a data breach or leak.