So much of what we do nowadays is online. Doing our shopping, paying our bills, reaching out to friends and family – all of these things require us to enter a few personal details. But how do we know our information is kept safe?
There are a few precautions we can all take to keep our information safe online.
Change your passwords regularly
Try changing your passwords every few months and never share it with anyone. And don’t use the same password across multiple accounts – that means if someone accesses one of your accounts, they could get into them all!
The more complicated the password the better. Make sure you’re including characters or numbers and try putting a few words together to make a password, not sure using one word and some numbers at the end.
Get wise on social media
There are lots of quizzes and games that float around on social media that are excellent ways for criminals to learn personal information about you.
They often include questions like your mothers’ maiden name or the city you were born in. Just the sort of questions that banks or other organisations use to set up your security questions to access your accounts.
Look out for phishing
Phishing is the term given when criminals try to trick people into doing 'the wrong thing', like clicking a link to a website that might ask you for your personal information.
Look out for emails or texts from contacts you don’t know that ask you to do something urgently or share personal details. They’ll often contain lots of spelling mistakes or general greetings like “Dear friend”.
If you’re unsure about a message or if you’re questioning who the sender is, don’t click any links.
Do you feel safe with us?
We want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make you feel safe when you’re using our app, our Midland Heart Homes portal or simply interacting with us online, so we’d love to hear your feedback.
We’ve pulled together a short survey to find out how secure you feel and what more we could do to help you stay safe online. It should only take 5 minutes to complete and your feedback will be really valuable.
