Would you believe that £15,000,000 has been taken from peoples accounts in Cambridge due to cybercrime over the last 12 months? Cybercrime now accounts for 50% of all reported crime and it is growing according to Nigel Sutton  (fraud and cybersecurity advisor for Cambridge constabulary).

Barclays hosted a great event this morning covering ways that fraud is happening and the best way to protect against it.

Joe Cook head of digital security at Barclays talked us through the 4 ways that both people and companies are hit. In the main because by nature we are very trusting soles

• Phishing and spearfishing ( where the bad guys are achieving a 25% success rate )
• Malicious software ( only 30pc businesses back up !!! so if hit by this business stops)
• Impersonation fraud
• Data theft

But there are easy ways to protect yourself. The main one being Passwords. These need to be changed regularly and now due to the sophisticated ways the crims have finding your password, they need to be no less than 16 characters. Seems it takes 16 trillion years to break a password this long! As opposed to 8 milliseconds to break one that is 6 characters long – the most used password in the UK is still 123456!

Did you know that all Passwords that have been stolen in the past are on the web for sale? Other things that you need to consider are

• Change your home router password regularly
• If you use public WiFi make sure your details are encrypted the crims love to collect data main point here is if you wouldn’t have the conversation in public don’t use the web.
• You should have a different password for every account. In the same way, you wouldn’t have the same key for all the doors you open.
• Give 5 seconds to think before you click any link on any email
• Make sure all your apps are updated – Updates are usually for security reasons

Fraud via text messages is also on the increase. This is where a number that looks like your bank tells you that something suspicious is happening with your bank. Again, the message here is to stop and think before you do anything.   Telephone numbers can be easily spoofed so don’t always believe the number that is calling or texting you.

Take out for me was that I need to be aware and definitely make my password stronger!

Maxine Lester