October Is Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Your computer, your personal information. How safe are you really online? October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and cyber criminals are finding new ways to trick people into giving up their money and sensitive information. Kathy Pedreas, a digital safety expert, is joining us now with the simple steps that you can take right now to stay safe online. Kathy, so good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Of course. Happy to be here. Awesome. So let's just jump right into it. I feel like we are all living in this digital world and there's always an extra step that we can take to stay safe. And it can start with first, as you would say, leveling up our login. So how should we do that? Yeah, I mean, like you said, there's so much that we do online, right? Our lives are a lot digitally. Just in the previous segment, someone was learning about their favorite Halloween decorations online. We entertain ourselves, we connect, we purchase things, we build businesses. But there are really simple and effective ways to secure that digital space so the first and most important thing that absolutely everybody should do is to turn on two-step verification which is sometimes multi-factor authentication and essentially think of it as a second lock on the front door of your digital life right so the same way you lock the door to your house this is locking the door to your digital house and adding a dead bolt because basically if a scammer or hacker whoever was to gain access to a password um then And having that data, the two step verification would prevent them from being able to get into your account because they would also need a secondary code. Such a good point there. And also describe what a passkey is for those who don't know what that is. Yes. So the passkeys are a little bit of the newer style of securing your accounts. You may have heard of passwords. That's kind of falling by the wayside now. And then passkey or power phrases is there's different steps. Right. So the first step, I would say, is turning on a passkey, which is also going to be in your settings. But also when you're and that's your phone kind of does that automatically. Right. You just enable it and it walks you through your steps. And in the TikTok app, if you go to your settings and security checkup tool, it would walk you through that as well. But sometimes there are instances when you need to create a password because passkey may not be available. And so in that instance, always use a power phrase. and a power phrase is essentially like a wild weird sentence that maybe you could guess but somebody else wouldn't guess so it's a little bit stronger than um than a password and the key with that is of course not to use the same password for everything which i think a lot of us are guilty of or it have been at least at one point um you know they always say if it's too good if it sounds too good then it probably is uh scams are a big deal out here how can we protect ourselves from exciting offers yeah um and very good point about not reusing the uh the passwords because when it comes to scams one of the biggest threats is phishing where you accidentally type in your password in the wrong account or something like that the wrong like a login page and so if you've reused that password now multiple accounts are vulnerable as opposed to just the one password that had that account but that you know scammers um and scams in general they're very good at tricking us into, you know, believing that whatever content they're putting out there is real. So a few of the red flags are, of course, if something looks too good to be true, you know, the get rich quick type direct messages, the comment for a free gift card or go to this website for a free gift card. The big rule that you should really live by online is that if the offer found you, if the message found you, then you should be suspicious of it. But in addition to being able to recognize common scams, all of the other steps that we've talked about would help protect you, even if sometimes you make a mistake. All right, good to know. Kathy, speaking of those other steps, we did have them pop up on the screen a few times. We are out of time, but it is so nice to talk to you. And thank you for helping us to discover more ways to make sure that we stay safe online. We appreciate you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Take care. All right, Julie, over to you. They are iconic bands.