Seriously? WOW! Aren’t we Special…
Educate Them on Malware and Scams
There’s a good chance that you’re way more familiar with the ins and ours of keeping your computer (and yourself) safe online than your friends and family are. In addition to helping secure their Wi-Fi network and updating their computers, you can also save your friends and family a lot of headaches by ensuring they’re familiar with common scams and sources of malware.
There are a few big topics worth talking about. Be sure to educate people about phishing emails—don’t give your personal information to anyone via unsolicited email, look at email headers to ensure that email from your bank is really from your bank, when it doubt go to the website itself and login (don’t click the links in the email).
Make sure your relatives, especially the older ones who might be more prone to trusting people and used to a more in-person way of doing business, understand that Microsoft is never going to call them about their computer (let alone demand money over the phone to fix it). Finally, if you want to break the cycle of visiting every holiday and uninstalling piles of crapware, then show them how to avoid installing three garbage apps along with the free software they install.
While all this stuff might be common sense to you, the reality is that millions of people get tricked by scams every year because they didn’t realize it was a scam—help protect your friends and family from identity theft and malware by taking a few extra minutes to talk about it with them.