Online Safety and Security
Core concepts
Online safety combines protecting accounts, devices, and personal data. Know strong password practice (length and uniqueness, managed by a password manager), multi-factor authentication, and the risks of reusing passwords. Recognise threats: phishing (fraudulent messages harvesting credentials), malware, ransomware, spyware, social engineering, and unsafe public Wi-Fi. Understand cookies and how to manage them, the role of antivirus and updates, and the value of backups.
Recognising phishing
Warning signs include urgency, threats of account closure, mismatched or spoofed sender addresses, generic greetings, unexpected attachments, and links whose visible text differs from the real destination. Legitimate organisations do not ask for passwords by email.
Traps in questions
- Believing a padlock or a familiar logo proves a message is genuine.
- Assuming antivirus removes the need for updates or backups.
- Thinking deleting an app removes data already shared.
- Confusing authentication (proving identity) with authorisation (what you may access).
Rule of thumb
Never act on a link in an unexpected message. Open the organisation's site yourself, or contact it via a known channel, and verify before entering credentials.
Worked example
An email says your bank account will close in 24 hours and links to a login page. You do not click. You open the bank's official site directly, log in, and find no warning. The message was phishing, and the urgency was the tell.