Make your New Year's resolution to be cyber safe

Hugh Boyes, a cyber security expert at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has issued five top tips which, he says, will help people to avoid becoming victims of cyber crime.

Boyes said: "With increasing threats to systems and new vulnerabilities emerging daily, we need to raise awareness of the need to improve the cyber security of all the technology we use.”

His top five tips are:

•  Do not use an account with administrative privileges for normal day-to-day activities and web browsing - accounts with lower privileges warn you if a programme tries to install software or modify computer settings thus allowing you to decide whether the proposed action is safe.

•  Ensure that your operating system and application software is up-to-date - many of the patches issued are to patch security vulnerabilities, the quicker these are patched the lower the risk that your computer can be compromised through known vulnerabilities where fixes are available. This should include up-to-date anti-malware software.

•  Take care when downloading and installing software, if it is free or is not from a well-recognised and trustworthy brand there is a risk that the software may include features that spy on you (the user), enable unsolicited advertising or install harmful software on your computer.

•  Treat with caution unsolicited emails containing attachments or hyperlinks (particularly shortened links), many phishing attacks attempt to trick you into opening a file loaded with malware or to visit a site which runs malicious scripts on your computer

•  Apply common sense (due diligence) if an email offer looks too good to be true or the prices on a website are abnormally low.