Wiltshire among most ‘tech-savvy’ area’s in Britain
281 crimes were reported in Wiltshire in the last year
A cyber-security study has revealed that Wiltshire is among the top 10 most ‘tech-savvy’ areas in the country.
The study found that our county had 3.87 cyber-crimes per 10,000 people in the last year, with 281 crimes reported during that period.
The figures suggest that people in Wiltshire are taking the right steps to keeping themselves and their information safe online.
Reece Small, from Salisbury-based IT firm Hive Communications, says personalized log-ins help keep our data secure: “You're going to want to look at things like 2 factor authentication to lock down your account with multiple methods of entry.
“Having recovery methods that are only personalized yourself and also using verification methods such as hardware-based tokens, that will allow you to sign in with a fingerprint and other authentication methods are like authenticators on your phone with six-digit randomized pins every 30 seconds.”
The Salisbury-based company provides internet, or cloud, communications for small or medium sized companies, aiming to ensure businesses have the right systems in place.
Common threats
The most common reported crimes were social media or email hacking, while malware was also a common method of criminal activity.
Reece told us how they differ and where to find potential threats: “if someone is hacking your account, it's traditionally to gain information.
“But malware can traditionally be delivered either through a phishing attack, or it can be through an unrecognizable link on the Internet.
“And those are traditionally either put in comment sections on social media or can be put on general websites that you're going on and you're not aware that that information or the links have been distributed there.”
How to protect ourselves
There is a straightforward way to protect ourselves and it surrounds how we set up passwords.
Tech companies are helping us secure our data with password managers, Reece explained how they work:
“You'll be able to essentially have a password management ‘vault’ that can help you forget any of your passwords except one major password that is also protected by two factor authentication.
“This ‘vault’ of your passwords will automatically log you in across websites in turn allowing you to randomly generate a password that you'll never need to remember making that itself secure and yourself having a different password across all your websites or services.”
So many of us now use online banking, buying things regularly with a tap of our phone, and Banks themselves have been tackling cyber-crime by layering log-ins to our online accounts.
Banks taking safety seriously, so should we
Reece recommends that we take the same approach with our emails and social media accounts:
“My recommendation would be for people to if they're on social media right now and they're finding that all they have to do to log into their account is just use an email address or password or your common services that you use that have these protection measures built in, allowing you to send a text-based authentication.
“Click yes to approve this sign in the two-factor authentication, ensure that they're secure, because if your bank's doing it to protect you from having your money taken, what's to say that you don't want your personal data taken?”