CYBERSECURITY AND THE ELDERLY 3
connection to the internet and email accounts. This marked an increase in the prevalence rate of
the internet among the elderly (Goud, 2017).
Cybercriminals’ greatest asset is ignorance. They prey on people’s lack of knowledge to
manipulate us into falling for their tricks. If you carefully look into the OWASP top ten, you will
notice that most of the hacks are not on a network level instead they are in your applications.
Hackers focus on hacking the person, not the machine. They do this using phishing, pharming,
the man in the middle and social engineering techniques (Perkins, 2014). Additionally, they
exploit some of the system vulnerabilities using viruses, worms, spyware, and Trojans. While
tech companies have launched a full assault against such attacks people remain to be the easiest
targets, especially the elderly. So, given their lack knowledge in tech matters, the elderly can
protect themselves using some techniques (Perkins, 2014).
How the Elderly can Protect Themselves
At the center of cybercrime is personal information. Protecting this information is as
important as knowing how to use the technology itself. The elderly can protect their information
by; selecting strong passwords, that are made up of numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters and
symbols, use of privacy settings in social media platforms, avoiding sending personal
information via emails to businesses, avoiding to click on pop-ups in web and mobile
applications, installing good anti-virus applications into their devices, updating software
frequently and ignoring the so-called “free” gifts messages in websites (Perkins, 2014).
Additionally, the elderly can further protect themselves by visit only reliable websites when
looking for information on the web. This can be done by checking for sites ending with .edu or
.gov when seeking official information on matters. Also, when online banking, they should use