Safety is one word we all heard from childhood and the need for it can't be quantified. I remember clearly how we were taught about the importance of safety and its measures during social studies classes over two decades ago. The topic never gets old which explains how important it is for not just humans to keep themselves safe because if we look at the animal world as well, they also have safety measures they practice to keep themselves away from harm.
Looking down on the need for safety automatically means putting oneself in harm's way and it usually doesn't end well for a lot of people.
There was a time in the world when all humans had to protect themselves from were wild animal attacks and things escalated from that to humans protecting themselves from fellow humans which can be very challenging because unlike animals that can't reason like us, a fellow human can't predict your next move since they can think like you.
Over the years, technology has helped us take safety to a whole different level but there is still harm lurking around because there are a lot of people who have abused technological advancement, they go about using different inventions to harm people in numerous ways. The internet is one of human greatest inventions and being able to get information, learn things and even explore the world is a great privilege.
As awesome as it is, a lot of crime happens through the internet and there is always a need for thorough safety when engaging online.
My journey with social platforms started with Facebook in 2010, I was a teenager and no one taught me what online security means. It was just a year after secondary school and I always visited cyber cafe to chat with my friends.
There was a particular day I didn't log out of my account and just left the cafe with about five minutes of my ticket remaining. The man who owned the cyber cafe called me back to lecture me about the consequences of what I did and it became clear to me that there were safety measures online as well.
I took my time to visit the man again to learn a few online security tips and I didn't understand much of what he explained until cybercrime became rampant across the world.
In 2015, I was busy on my phone when I got a notification in my mailbox. It was a code requesting to change my Facebook password and I was confused because I didn't initiate it. While wondering how it happened, I got a call from a strange number requesting the code and he claimed to be a staff from Facebook trying to help me prevent my account from getting hacked.
I ended the call immediately and thought about what he said. Honestly, it was a dumb excuse because, from the day I opened the account till that moment, I never received a call from Facebook so why now and why was the message carrying a request to change the password instead of alert about someone trying to log in into my account?
I didn't respond to the call again after and I discovered some months later that my friend's Facebook account was hacked just like that. I dug deeper into those fake stunts and discovered that a whole lot of people fall into these online scams every day. It happened to me several times later but not just with my social account, sometimes they call requesting the numbers on credit cards and so on but being the type that doesn't joke with any form of security measures whether offline or online, I have been able to resist them.
A female friend of mine was scammed online of about 250,000 naira and I didn't believe that she was too careless to have allowed such to happen. She got a message from someone telling her about opportunities online and she just jumped into it right away without any investigation.
Many times, I have heard people hail this criminals behind cyber crimes. They call them smart and many other things but I don't see them that way. My take on them is that they aren't smart and they just exploit their victim's desperation and greed.
Although people fall scams unknowingly but aside from that, DESPERATION AND GREED are the cause of many cybercrime cases we hear of and I wonder why someone would just comes to your DM and starts telling you impossible things. Imagine being told that your $500 can become $1500 in 3 hours without any concrete plan of how to triple that money and these criminals are so good that they give offers that you can't resist.
A guy chatted me up sometimes ago telling me about a cryptocurrency giveaway which was juicy but from the look of things, it was fake. I checked online for the project he was talking about and found nothing.
I barely chat with strangers except when you have serious stuff to tell me about and once it has to do with persuading me to invest or do something money related on our first chat, I just cut you off immediately. Many of these criminals exploit their victims when they show any sign of greed or desperation and things can go worse from there.
They start asking sensitive questions and because our thoughts are clouded by the rewards they are offering, we just pour out the information that we shouldn't.
It doesn't end with calls, these criminals send mail and even sometimes random chats with links that can cause harm to you in a lot of ways. I can't remember the last time I clicked a link from someone I don't know and even if I know you, there must have been a conversation about the link before sending it.
I don't use auto-login on websites because it can be very dangerous. After all, it's my device but with the level of technology in the world today, a lot can happen while handling your phone. Having your keyboard save your passwords, auto-login, and backing up passwords with mail can be very dangerous and we just have to be careful because these things give hackers easy access to take us down. Instead of finding a way to crack our stuff down one after the other, these things I mentioned above can sell us out easily.
Finally, I want to call our attention to leaving our device location, wifi, hotspot and Bluetooth, these things used to mean nothing but they can be dangerous these days. There are lots of upgrades out there and cyber criminals are pushing every day and night to make their dirty act easier. I was watching a show where a hacker connected to someone's PC within 20 seconds with a device and it was surprising.
With my experience, I have realize that we can't be too perfect with safety but we can try our best to ensure our safety both offline and online.
This is my response to Leo Task Day 7 monthly prompt and you can also be part of this amazing initiative from INLEO, feel free to learn more about it HERE or check 
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