Almost 61 per cent of women face online risk
A known good practice is to ensure that you have a good operating system installed on your device
Arecent global survey conducted by Microsoft revealed that 61 per cent women in India faced online risk personally, and around 65 per cent reported that they knew of family or a friend who had been subjected to it.
While 70 per cent reported being highly concerned about online safety, the concern is that only 42 per cent of women knew when to get help. And in fact, they also exhibited a greater propensity to lose trust both online and offline, lose sleep and become more stressed. The reaction to online harassment led to women increasing online privacy controls and also reducing the amount of information they shared online.
The data on online civility reflects what is usually observed offline in the physical world — high concern for safety and security, an initial confidence to be able to manage all kinds of issues, lack of awareness about help mechanisms when actually subjected to harassment, followed by, unfortunately in a lot of cases, social withdrawal.
While there are unlimited variables in an offline world that impact safety and security, many of which are not in one’s control, in the online world, there are a few good practices you can adopt to ensure that you remain safe online. One of the lesser known good practices is to ensure that you have a good operating system (OS) installed on your devices.
Microsoft’s Windows 10 can actively addresses modern security threats through strong identity protection and access control, information protection, and threat resistance. Some of the features that help in online safety include:
Windows Hello: It provides biometric (facial and/or fingerprint recognition) alternative to passwords to provide secure instant access to your device and online services. This way you ensure that there are no unauthorised logins on your machine.
Microsoft Edge: It has been designed to be the most secure browser that Microsoft has ever released and it uses advanced sandboxing technology to isolate what you’re experiencing online from your personal information, data and of course Windows 10 itself.
Family features: If you are a parent/mom you are definitely concerned about your kid’s online activities so with just a few clicks you can help keep your kids safer online by blocking adult websites, helping you set good screen time habits for your kids, blocking age-inappropriate apps and games, and providing you a look into their digital world through activity reports.
SmartScreen: It helps protect you from phishing sites that may attempt to steal your identity and personal information. It performs reputation checks for each site you visit, and will block the malicious ones. It will also defend you against socially-engineered downloads of malicious software using a cloud based app reputation service that is continuously evaluating the billions of new apps that are published to the internet every year for malicious behaviour.
Windows Defender: It is a robust anti-malware solution that is constantly updated to meet evolving threats as they are identified and is quick to detect and protect you against emerging malware, seen in the first critical hours. It uses a highly scalable and geodistributed backend service in the cloud that leverages data from about one billion devices to draw lightning fast insights and respond in hundreds of milliseconds.