ON-LINE SECURITY NEWS FROM NORTH WEST REGIONAL CRIME UNIT

Please feel free to share them with your colleagues, families, friends and clients.  They are really helpful and you never know, may just save somebody from a cyber attack of some sort.

Avoiding Track and Trace scams

With shops, pubs and restaurants now reopening across the country, many are requiring patrons to supply contact details to support the Track and Trace programme.

While this is undoubtedly contributing significantly towards the fight against COVID-19, it is also providing Cyber Criminals opportunities to target innocent people with phishing campaigns by pretending to be NHS Contact Tracers.

To help ensure you don’t fall victim to a scam, remember Contact Tracers will never:
• Ask you for any form of payment
• Ask you for any passwords or PINs
• Ask any details about your bank account
• Ask you to download anything
• Ask you to hand over control of your PC
• Send someone to your home

Home Working: Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay

Prompted by the restrictions of the COVID-19 Pandemic, many businesses and individuals have been embracing Home Working like never before. Not only has Home Working allowed people to maintain social distancing and stay safe, but it has also afforded a new degree of flexibility to many people’s work lives.

Many individuals and businesses are warming to the idea of continuing to work from home beyond the end of the pandemic. It’s thought that offering Home Working as a working arrangement, and having a portion of their work force operating from home could become the norm for many businesses. But just like with any new technology or way of working, Home Working introduces a variety of risks ranging from loss of data, insecure connections and use of personal IT which may be vulnerable.

With this in mind, it is essential that businesses continue to ensure Home Working arrangements and equipment remain effective and secure. To aid in this, the National Cyber Security Centre have produced some excellent guidance on a range of Home Working related topics including preparing your organisation and staff, secure home and mobile working, home working on personal IT and using video conferencing services securely.

I’ve just got a suspicious message, what do I do?

Suspicious emails, dodgy phone calls and dubious text messages, we’ve all had them. It seems like every day there’s a new scam criminals are attempting to use to con you out of your hard earned cash.

It is sometimes difficult to know what to do if you get an email, phone call or text message which just doesn’t seem right, and even harder if you’ve already responded.

Thankfully, the National Cyber Security Centre have just released their latest one size fits all guide on how to spot the most obvious signs of a scam, and exactly what to do!

Don’t lose out when shopping online during COVID-19

Throughout much of the COVID-19 lockdown, many have been reliant on online retailers for their shopping whether it be for essentials, DIY supplies or just a little retail therapy.

It didn’t take long for Cyber Criminals to plan and launch new scams taking advantage of all this new almost entirely online shopping. Examples of such scams have included selling items that simply never existed, selling bogus COVID-19 testing kid and even setting up entire fake shopping websites.

To help you ensure you continue to safely purchasing items on the web, Action Fraud have released their 8 top tips to shopping online safely.