Online security has hit the headlines again in the last few days. We’ve had the Telegraph calming us down with the headline ‘Britain vulnerable from cyber attacks for at least 20 years’; which is hardly reassuring! The article went on to say that the threat has come about due to the chronic shortage of qualified IT experts. This would appear to stem right back to school and the lack of promotion for science and technology.
It is truly worrying when you read that Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, is calling it “astonishing” the level of cyber attacks we’re encountering. I’ve read reports that there is the equivalent of 120,000 cyber attacks a day, estimating a cost of up onwards to £27 billion a year. Simply staggering!
So it would seem that we should be advising our children to pursue a career in IT. There is a huge gap in that labour market. As a company we can call on IT support for our business and I have to say we’ve never found there to be any lacking in their expertise. However just how secure are we currently within the sphere of the home PC? Are there things we should be doing to conquer these threats to our online world within our homes?
Most certainly I think the passwords we use certainly need attention. Often we’re guilty of using such simple passwords that for the ‘none too’ determined hacker would be easily conquered. We now have PC’s, and mobile offerings such as iPads, phones all with passwords. So it’s easier just to have the one size fits all passwords – right?
Not really. If it’s easy for you to remember one password for all these then it’ll be easy for the hacker. We must make these passwords hard to fathom out. Of course once we look into the PC we now have social media accounts, shopping carts, the PayPal account, and all manner of things.
Hackers either for money or a bizarre sense of fun are not daunted by being one step ahead of security systems. So we have to be adept at making sure we have some malware in place. It works a treat just running in the background. And don’t forget to grab some of this PC loving for your mobile devices.
I think the main thing we need to stay away from or be wary of is the rise of the scam. For me the old adage if it feels too good to be true it most certainly is. Make sure your PC is covered with some great anti-virus software.
I’ll leave you with a little brevity; olden but a good one!
‘A friend of mine was asked by his bank to change his password and it had to include eight characters, so he used “snowwhiteandthesevendwarves “
Until next time – keep safe!
