Guides Safer web browsing

Staying safe online means keeping up to date. And nowhere is that more true than with browsing the web. Criminals are constantly finding new ways to attack you…but browsers and anti-virus programs are also being updated to protect you. There is a time lag between the two so it’s worth taking basic precautions yourself and knowing what to look out for to keep yourself safe.

Several times a year, Apple, Google and Microsoft release emergency updates to address vulnerabilities that could be exploited to install malware or allow attackers to execute malicious code in a webpage.

This underlines just how important it is to keep your operating system and software up to date. Bitter experience has taught people that it’s not always a good idea to install updates the moment they come out (because often problems are only found when large numbers of people begin using the software for real). Our approach is to assess the importance of the update/the scale of the vulnerability and wait 48 hours unless it is clearly essential to install it straight away. But you shouldn’t wait too long because attackers are constantly searching for new flaws in popular software – and browsers are a favoured target.

Once you’re happy your web browser is up to date (all you need to do is restart it), then check your anti-virus program and make sure that’s up to date as well. Many have a capability to scan web pages as you browse and this is worth using. But don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. In the end, keeping yourself safe depends on exercising a large degree of skepticism, especially with anything that involves providing personal information.

It may be tempting to let your browser store your login credentials for all the sites you visit and obviously it saves time. But we believe this is not the most effective way to store your passwords and you would be better advised to use a password manager. For the full story on passwords, please read our separate guide.

Do get into the habit of looking at the address bar and checking whether there is a padlock in it. This means your connection to the website is using a secure protocol called HTTPS. This is important because it means any information you send or receive can't be read by anyone else. The insecure version is called HTTP and when you use this anything you type is sent exactly as it’s entered which means that it’s easy to capture. You can see that an obvious way of attacking us is to try to persuade you to go to a malicious copy of the genuine website, perhaps by sending you an email with a false link.

When you check the web address, begin by reading from the end. It might begin with something that looks correct – but if it says my account.google.com and then includes more fullstops/periods then it’s messing with you. If you’re a Safari user, Apple unhelpfully changed the way the address bar works so that by default it shows only a simplified version. You can change this by going into Preferences|Advanced|Smart Search Field and clicking to show Full Website Address.

Be particularly wary of shortened URLs (e.g. Bitly etc.) These are an ideal way to disguise where a link is actually going to take you. If in doubt, hover over the address so you can see where you’re going and, if necessary, go to the relevant website and check what the actual link is. But, obviously, legitimate websites won’t send you shortened addresses for your account so do think twice before clicking.

And, alas, even if the web address looks like it’s genuine then it might not be. There are plenty of symbols that look like the Latin alphabet but aren’t. Take www.example.com and www.exαmple.com. You have to look quite hard to see the second one has a Greek alpha in the middle.

Finally, have a look at what extensions or plugins you have installed. These are small programs that run inside your browser and they can be very helpful but, unfortunately, they are also a hostage to fortune (or at least to the whims of the developer). There have been well-documented cases of widely-used extensions being changed to track your web browsing or capture personal information. Reviews don’t always pick up these problems because they may take time to identify, so our rule is don’t use extensions unless there’s a really good reason.

Estimates put the number of internet users in 2022 at 4.9 billion….or over half the population of the world. Self-evidently, never have so many people been connected before. This represents an unprecedented opportunity for human development but, of course, it means that criminals have a vast pool of targets to attack and it’s no surprise that they continue to do so. This means that it’s essential to make caution a key ingredient in your approach to web browsing. And if in any doubt, just don’t click.

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