3 Online Safety Tips for Senior Citizens

As a senior citizen, you stand to reap a whole host of benefits from accessing the Internet. Embracing the wonders of the world wide web will allow you to reconnect with old friends via social media, and it will enable you to converse with your family members on a day-to-day basis even while you’re apart.

You should know, however, that nothing about the web is plane sailing. Unfortunately, every time you access the Internet, you run the risk of being exposed to cybercrime. Fear not, however, as there are things that you can do to fight back against all the lowlife hackers, scammers, and cybercriminals that are lurking out there on the web.

To find three tips that will be sure to help you remain safe while you spend time online, be sure to read on:

Understand the lingo

You’re never going to fend off cybercrime if you don’t know the exact dangers that you’re up against. To provide yourself with a better opportunity at being able to stay safe online, you must understand the lingo.

Here are just a few of the cybercrime terms, trends, and concepts that you should get to grips with:

Back door — a way in which security mechanisms are bypassed

Denial-of-service (DoS) — an attack that overwhelms the resources of a system and, in turn, forces it to crash

Malware — software that is defined as malicious

Phishing — a cybercrime technique in which innocent Internet users are tricked into clicking bogus links

Trojan — a program that hides malware, worms, and viruses before carrying them into a system and/or device

Get to grips with email spoofing

To your untrained eye, most of the emails that you receive will look genuine. You must understand that this is not necessarily the case. Email scams are rife, and you must remember this every time you access your Outlook or Gmail account.

Better still, you must know how to spot and avoid this specific type of phishing. As detailed in this in-depth article on the matter, you can deal with email spoofing in an incredibly efficient and safe manner by:

• Thinking twice before you open attachments from unknown senders
• Avoiding emails that promise get-rich-quick schemes — if it looks too good to be true, it is
• Flagging suspicious emails and reporting them to your email software provider
• Perform Google searches to see if anybody else has previously complained about the email you’ve been sent

Ask your loved ones for support

You may not have grown up immersed in modern technology, but the younger generations of your family have. Your grandchildren have been raised with the Internet, quite literally, at their fingertips, which means they’ll always be able to support you in your bid to remain safe online. All you have to do is put your pride to the side and ask them for help!

Once you put the advice laid out above into practice, you’ll be sure to enjoy a safer web surfing experience every time you access the Internet.