Together for a better internet
During this past year the internet has become our link to
the rest of the world, connecting family and friends as well as allowing
business and education to continue at arm's length. With this in mind this year's Safer Internet
Day becomes even more important. For
2021 the emphasis is on young people and making sure their voices are at the
heart of the campaign which has been trying to raise awareness of emerging
online issues and current concerns since 2004.
Safer Internet Day aims to inspire conversation about using technology responsibly, respectfully, critically and creatively; covering topics from cyberbullying to fake news and how and when to share your personal details online.
As we spend more time online the risk of fraud grows exponentially, in January the Royal United Services Institute warned the online fraud epidemic is now a national security threat and last week the BBC reported that home working increases cyber-security fears. But there are lots of things you can do to keep yourself, your family and all your details safe and with practice you can work out which website to trust and which to avoid or at the very least question the content.
The Neighbourhood Watch scheme website has sections
dedicated to identifying email and online scams (here).
The Safer Internet Day website has a vast array of information and fact sheets
on how to keep yourself and your family safe online. The UK dedicated website is here.
Find out how aware of the risks you are by taking the Safer Internet quiz here.
How did you score?
Now you're questioning everything! What about CJS, why should you be happy to share your information with us?
We're registered with the Information Commissioners Officer, are GDPR compliant and endeavour to follow best practice as laid down by both.
But what else, we are PCI DSS complaint - that's an alphabet soup way of saying we look after your credit card details. We have changed a few office practices and added clauses into our Data Protection Policy to cover working from home ensuring your data says safe with us. Like so many the CJS Team are all working from home and connecting into the office over the internet and so last year we upgraded our hardware to make it more secure including enhancing the encryption on our VPN meaning that even if sensitive data is being used out of the physical office it never leaves the office network. But what about outside threats? We run different anti-virus and anti-malware software to protect us as much as we're able from outside attacks and just in case anything should manage to get through the firewalls and various electronic checks and balances all your data is backed up on airgapped equipment - that means it's not connected to the internet, or even the office network, so it can be installed on a clean machine. No, I'm not paranoid - much - just experienced in people deleting big files (all your email addresses), accidentally corrupting data (mailing lists) or webhosts upgrading our server and somehow overwriting the website with a two year old backup…. If you'd like to read this sorry saga you'll find it here on the blog (apologies for the very many typos, we were rather stressed at the time!) so yes, we take every precaution possible, with good reason.