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Cyber safety

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For starters, everyone needs to know about the benefits of cyber safety and why it is essential for every internet user. Cyber safety or Internet safety is protecting oneself from computer crime and reduce risk of security breaches to private and confidential information to the user.
By the end of this article, we will know the threats cyber crime can pose to our normal lives and how we can deal with these for prevention. As the world evolves through the eras of technology, the number of internet users is drastically increasing and most of these users tend to be children. Now we may wonder why a child needs to worry about his/her safety while using the internet. This is one of the reasons why cyber safety has been underrated for the past few years. Even though a child may not know about cyber threats…he/she will act as a portal to private information on that particular system.
Few crimes that have already been committed related to this subject ( Security of Information) can be :

  1. Phishing : When a kid surfs the net he/she doesn’t really worry about entering personal information ( such as name, email, phone numbers etc) if required by a particular game of sorts as long the game looks interesting and fun. Through these fake websites, the scammers gain access to personal and maybe private information which is usually not provided by an adult. This is known as Phishing…..where the scammer poses himself as a trustworthy person or website to gain access to information . To prevent this from happening we can restrict access to unsupported websites which can done by any adult who knows about the parental control option in the browsers used.
  2. Internet Scams : Internet Scams are things we are aware of mostly, its where…people try to conduct their business online and get scammed into doing things they regret.This can be prevented by either meeting these business partners in person or maybe confirming the existence and the legibility of the partners. This is mostly done to gain property through tricks.
  3. Malware : This is probably a new term for many. It is the use of disguised software particularly used to gain access to usernames and passwords. Despite many attempts to figure out a solution to this, there is still a problem while trying to find out if a particular file is infected or not. The information attained through these softwares is usually transferred by email to random locations across the globe.

The above 3 threats are some of the reasons to know the requirement and importance of Cyber Safety, but we have only discussed it in terms of Security of Information. The next field of this article will tell us about the threats which cyber criminals have posed on people and their effect on personal lives.

We will now talk about the act of Cyber Bullying/ Stalking. Have you all heard about the Blue whale game and the threats it posed while it lasted. This game was conducted via social media, instant messaging sites and apps and the use of webcameras in the computers or laptops.
The users basically get hacked as soon as they open a link referring to an unknown source. Then the users were threatened to follow harsh instructions or else face consequences which I will not be discussing about.By doing so the cyber criminal has access to everything that particular user owns. This can cause serious damage to a person, both mentally and physically. The whole point of this example was to make you understand the issues faced by users in cyber crimes. All though underrated by most, Cyber safety is an essential requirement to everyone who uses to the internet.

There have been many cases related to cyber crime in the past few years. These cases are usually dealt with by agencies such as AHTCC (Australian High Tech Crime Center), Childnet etc. There is a good chance that the requirement of cyber safety will blow peoples minds in the upcoming years. It may or already has become one of the beacons which attract techies in the field of IT to work on it. The reason being that Security is one thing that cannot be compromised on. The sooner we act the better for everyone.


Last Updated : 05 Sep, 2018
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