National Cyber Security Awareness Month - 1 – 31 October 2024
Cyber Aware is a government national campaign relating to cyber security which is led by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). As since April 2020, members of the public have reported over 10.5 million suspicious emails to the UK’s cyber experts. This has therefore resulted in the take down of 76,000 online scams. However, there has been a 161% increase in unauthorized access to personal information offences, such as hacking, last year. The aim of the campaign is to empower and enable the public to have a better understanding about how to stay safe and secure online, the campaign is also to encourage the general public to take up two behaviors to protect important accounts and emails. The campaign pushes for passwords to be based upon 3 random words and that we should set up a 2-step verification for our data.
The NCSC state that there are two practical steps which can be taken to prevent the public and small businesses from the majority of cyber incidents:
- Use a strong and different password for your email.
Your password for your email should be based on 3 random words, this password should be strong and different from all of your other passwords.
- Turn on 2 step verification for your email.
By turning on a two-step verification for your email this will make it even more difficult for cyber criminals to access your data even if they do have your password. If you have set up two step verification, when you try to log in to your emails it will ask you to verify your identity, this can be by sending a code to your phone when you log in to your emails using a different device. By setting up the two step verification this significantly decreases the likelihood of an account being hacked, as stealing a password and a device used to authenticate a login is much more difficult.
Therefore, lets all take the appropriate steps to keep ourselves safe on the internet!
