Security experts have been using the 12th annual Safer Internet Day today to share best practice tips on internet security, as new research revealed that increasing numbers of both adults and children have been on the wrong end of cruel or abusive online behavior.
Safer Internet Day was originally conceived by the EU back in 2004 and then taken up by the Insafe network as a focal point and awareness-raising campaign to promote more responsible use of online services – especially among the young.
A survey of over 1000 11-16-year-olds by the UK Safer Internet Centre found that, although the internet is a “positive place” for most kids, 30% still claimed that someone had been “mean” to them online at least once in the past year.
A separate ComRes study found a similar number of adult netizens (25%) had experienced the same.
It continued:
“Adults are as likely as children to have occasionally seen people post things that attack a certain group, e.g. racist, sexist or homophobic comments (41%), or share gossip or rumours about others (38%) on the internet.”
F-Secure chief research officer, Mikko Hypponen, listed a few ways ordinary web users can “create a better internet together” – as per the theme of this year’s Safer Internet Day.
This includes asking more questions about any data collection features of new hardware, and using a separate browser for sites like Facebook and Google so these internet firms can’t track your web activity.
Users should also demand that their AV vendors are more transparent about what data they collect to ‘protect’ their customers.
A recent F-Secure poll found half of respondents claiming they trust the internet very little or not at all when it comes to security and privacy.
“The internet is a wonderful thing, but there are things going wrong in the online world: malware spread by cyber-criminals, of course, governments using the technology to spy on their own citizens, and all the other privacy concerns that technology creates,” said Hypponen.
“We have two roads we can go down: we can either continue the slide away from our digital freedoms, or we can take action to try to preserve a free and open internet.”
Meanwhile, Websense principal security analyst, Carl Leonard, was also on hand to dole out advice on how to stay safer online.
Among his key messages were to avoid unknown websites and unsolicited, suspicious emails; only enter confidential data onto an HTTPS site; ensure OS, key apps and security tools are up-to-date; use hard-to-guess passwords; and don’t reuse passwords across multiple accounts.