10 Things Parents Need To Do To Protect Their Families Online

Today, parents are bombarded with information on how to protect their families online. With data breaches in the news every day it seems, the cybersecurity industry touts hundreds of things we need to do in order to stay safe online.

This is actually resulting in a phenomenon termed ‘security fatigue’. People get overwhelmed with the sheer volume of stuff we are told we must do to stay secure, that actually we get paralysed by the complexity of it all. As a result, parents end up having no protection at all.

Luckily, the reality is actually much simpler than it would appear. At SimpleCyberLife.com we believe there are only 9 or 10 tasks parents need to do to protect their families online. We’ve summarised what these are below.

Breach monitoring

Most people don’t know that you can actually check if you or your kids have already been hacked. You can also set up something called breach monitoring (for free), which monitors the internet so you can detect when your personal data might have been hacked. Without this, you wouldn’t even know that your personal information had fallen into the wrong hands until it was too late. Use haveibeenpwned.com to check your email address for data breaches and breachalarm.com to set up free breach monitoring!

Using a VPN

It’s worth considering a VPN to protect your family that little bit more. VPN’s can mask information like your IP address, location, and search history, keeping them from being tracked by websites, internet browsers, cable companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and others. They can also help protect your personal information and other data as it’s in transit or being sent from and received by your device. Take a look at the Private Internet Access review for more details.

Social media privacy settings

Social media is often the way cybercriminals gather important personal information which can then be used to attack us. As a result, social media companies are being forced to offer tighter privacy settings for their users and we should all be using these, ensuring that only those people we want to have access to our personal data. Tasks to be performed are;

Review privacy settings for all social media sites you (and your kids) have.

Disable smartphone geotagging on photos.

Review historic posts (photos, videos and comments) for sensitive info.

Following some simple rules to stay safe such as not over-sharing your life online and Only accepting friend requests from people you know in real life.

Mobile device settings

Due to the increasing threat for mobile devices, there are a couple of things we need to do in order to lock them down. Tasks to be performed are setting up secure screen locks and automatic software updates.

Home wifi setup

Our home WiFi is the primary way that we access the internet but it is surprising how insecure some WiFi routers come out of the box. There are three things we need to do to ensure the security of our WiFi boxes and therefore help protect all of the family devices that connect to it. Tasks to be performed include changing the default passwords and setting up automatic software updates.

Anti-virus

Anti-virus software helps keep a number of cyber threats such a malware, ransomware and crypto-jacking at bay. It helps prevent attacks like sextortion, fraud and identity theft. All one needs to do is install a decent anti-virus software (like BitDefender or Avast).

Cloud back-ups

If you’re using your devices for anything more than just browsing the web, then having our data backed up is one of the best ways we can instantly recover from crippling cyber attacks such as ransomware. With cloud back-ups, you’d restore your data from an hour before and just shrug the attack off as a mere inconvenience! Without it, you’d have to spend hours trying to recover your data and the likelihood is, you wouldn’t get it back. Setting up automated cloud back-ups using TimeMachine (Macs) or Genie Timeline (Windows) can be a massive time saver!

Password manager

Password managers are a piece of software (much like an anti-virus program) and they take all the hassle out of having to remember passwords, all the while making sure they are kept securely. It’s a modern-day must-have for all devices!

Secure browsing

Our internet browsers are the main portal through which we access the internet and you would be amazed at how insecure some standard browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox are. We need to either ensure we review the security settings of our chosen browser or we are using a secure browser like BRAVE.

Family & friends education

Educating our loved ones is vital because one family member can be the weak link for the whole family. Cybercriminals know that kids can be the weak link and can often be their way ‘in’ to get access to the more sensitive data stored by parents. Education can help combat almost all of the cyber threats out there in some form or another, so the little time it takes to talk about cybersecurity is time well spent. For example, if everyone in the family knows how to spot a phishing email, this will drastically reduce the number of viruses making their ways onto family devices.

There you have it. The nine basic security tasks parents need to protect their families online. It gets better too…depending on your personal circumstances, it might be that you only actually need to do as little as five or six of them! Each family is different and has different protection needs.