The “Online Safety Club” initiated by the Romanian Police, the National Directorate of Cyber Security (DNSC) and the Romanian Association of Banks (ARB) organized a series of workshops to teach children and young people how to surf the Internet safely.
Children and young people have been taught to avoid the pitfalls of the Internet
The Online Safety Club was launched on the occasion of this year's International Internet Safety Day and trained young people to effectively protect themselves from online threats.
In an ever-expanding digital world, the online safety of children and adults is becoming a growing priority. Surfing the Internet comes with a multitude of educational and entertainment benefits, but also risks. Digital education about cyber threats can guide users from an early age to wiser decisions.
To help the little ones navigate safely, the initiators of the #OnlineSafety national project come up with tips for young people, which we must all take into account for our safety when surfing the Internet:
1. Avoid accessing links received from unknown sources, by email or SMS, through communications on social media or through chat platforms, and do not fill in personal or banking data on them.
2. Do not disclose bank card data: name, number, expiration date, CVV2/CVC (the three-digit number on the back of the card). Do not enter your PIN on websites and never disclose it. The site where the card details are to be entered to make an online payment must be secure, i.e. the link starts with https. Payments are made only when you are connected to secure networks, not public networks.
3. Never provide your account credentials (username, password, additional authentication code or back-up code) to other people.
4. Don't click when you are tagged in a social media post that promises big winnings and be wary of messages that appear to come from banks. Fake messages often contain impersonal address formulas, grammatical or expression mistakes.
5. Transfers must not be made and operations processed only on the basis of an urgent e-mail or telephone request, without verifying the authenticity of the message. Banks never ask for confidential data such as card data, access passwords, PIN codes, neither by phone, nor by SMS, nor by e-mail, nor by completing them on the website.
6. Carefully read, before opening, any message or file that appears to be sent from the bank or other persons/institutions and, if in doubt, contact the sender to validate the content of the received message through a communication channel different.
7. If you need to receive money, the IBAN (account number consisting of 24 characters, letters and numbers) is the one that must be communicated and not the data on the card. Asking for card details by other people is actually a trap because the card is a payment tool and not a money collection tool.
8. Beware of investment proposals! Large and unexpected winnings can hide fraud attempts. Check investment-related information and increased attention to the phenomenon where the image and voice of public figures are used to convince you to invest or install applications that later access your bank account.
The organizers of the national project #SiguranțaOnline advise all Internet users to install the latest operating system updates and an antivirus and to ensure that all the devices they use to surf the Internet work on the basis of updated versions of operating systems and are protected with an effective antivirus solution.
