Our community is often targeted by bad people.  The bad people we are talking about include scammers, hackers, phishers, and distributors of badware.  We want to fight back and we want to enlist your help.

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM). Held every October, NCSAM is a collaborative effort between government and industry to raise awareness about the importance of online safety and to ensure that all Americans have the education and resources they need to be safer and more secure online.

The Senior Tech Club is an NCSAM Champion.  We are committed to helping you stay safe.   We will use the month of October to focus our weekly News and Nuggets email on topics and conversations that will help stay safe and secure online.  We will do this  as you continue to build your skills and confidence with your devices.  Every week in October we will share a tip, a nugget or information that will help keep you safe.

Keeping your internet-connected devices free from malware and security holes makes the internet safer for you and more secure for everyone.There are several recommendations that come from the National Cyber Security Alliance on their StopThinkConnect.org site under the theme, Keep a Clean Machine.  

Here are two important recommendations for our community of iPhone and iPad users:  

1.  Keep your Software up to date.  With your iPhones and iPads, this means that you should try to keep your IOS (the software that runs your phone) updated to the latest practical version.  At the Senior Tech Club, we like to be practical about this.  We don’t encourage our community to be among the first to update to the latest version.  But after the dust settles, we encourage you to complete your updates.  We dedicate a page on our website to the latest recommendation.  This is our first featured nugget of this week’s email.

2.  Remove Unused Apps.  We recognize that with your iPhones, there is an app for everything.  Sometimes you install apps that you may not use or use only temporarily, for example an app used on a vacation.  It’s a good plan to keep your machine clean by removing unused app.  Our second featured nugget of the week will show you how.