Understand the digital world.
Act with confidence.
Practical writing about online safety, privacy, scams, emerging technology, responsible participation and the devices we depend on.
Deepfakes and AI Voice Scams: What's Real, What's Not
The technology that clones a voice from a few seconds of audio, or generates a convincing video of someone saying things they never said, is no longer a research curiosity. It's a scam tool in active use.
Latest thinking.
Deepfakes and AI Voice Scams: What's Real, What's Not
The technology that clones a voice from a few seconds of audio, or generates a convincing video of someone saying things they never said, is no longer a research curiosity. It's a scam tool in active use.
WhatsApp Scams Targeting South African Families: A Field Guide
WhatsApp is where a huge share of South African family life happens online — which is exactly why it's become the preferred hunting ground for a specific set of scams.
Digital Estate Planning: What Happens to Your Passwords After Death
Most estate planning focuses on physical and financial assets. Almost none of it addresses the dozens of online accounts a person leaves behind, many locked behind a password nobody else has.
Load Shedding and Your Router: The Security Gap Nobody Talks About
Every power cut is also a small security event for your home network — most people just never notice, because nothing breaks in a way you can see.
Securing Your Smart Home Devices
A smart camera, plug, or speaker is a small computer connected to the internet, running software you'll probably never think about again after setup — which is exactly the problem.
A Non-Scary Guide to VPNs: When You Actually Need One
VPN advertising oversells the danger and the solution in equal measure. Here's what a VPN actually does, and the specific situations where it's genuinely worth using one.
Festive Season Online Shopping: Staying Safe Through Black Friday and December
Scammers plan around the same shopping calendar retailers do. The volume of genuine deals, deliveries, and payment activity in November and December is exactly what fake versions of all three hide inside.
Safe Online Dating: Red Flags and Verification Tips
Most online dating experiences are perfectly ordinary. The exceptions are worth taking seriously, because romance scams specifically exploit the trust-building that dating itself requires.
Cryptocurrency Scams: What to Watch For
Crypto scams borrow the same emotional levers as any other scam — trust, urgency, greed dressed up as opportunity. The technology is new; the underlying con usually isn't.
Public Wi-Fi: When It's Fine and When It's Not
The old blanket advice — never use public Wi-Fi — doesn't match how most people actually live. The more useful question is what you're doing on it, not whether you're on it at all.
Ransomware 101: What It Is and Why Backups Are Your Real Defense
Ransomware doesn't steal your files — it locks them and demands payment for the key. The single most effective defense has nothing to do with the attack itself: it's whether you had a copy elsewhere.
Keeping Kids Safe Online: A Practical Guide for South African Parents
The goal isn't to keep your child off the internet — that ship has sailed for most families. The goal is to make sure they know what to do when something goes wrong, and that they'll actually tell you.
Banking App Safety: What South African Banks Actually Ask (and Never Ask)
Almost every successful banking scam depends on one thing: the victim believing the bank itself made contact. Here's what your bank will never actually ask for.
SIM Swap Fraud: South Africa's Most Costly Scam
SIM swap fraud doesn't need you to click anything. It targets your mobile network provider instead of you directly — and once it succeeds, every OTP meant to protect you gets delivered straight to the attacker.
Understanding POPIA: What South Africans Should Know About Their Data Rights
You have the legal right to ask any South African company what data it holds on you, why it's holding it, and to have it corrected or deleted. Most people never use that right, simply because they don't know it exists.
Cyberbullying: Recognizing and Responding
Cyberbullying rarely stays contained to a single platform or a single bad day. It follows the person home, onto every device, at any hour — which is exactly what makes it different from the schoolyard version.
Small Business Cybersecurity Without an IT Department
Most small South African businesses assume real cybersecurity requires a budget and a specialist they don't have. Most of what actually matters is a handful of decisions, not a department.
Working From Home Securely: A Practical Checklist
A home network was never designed with the assumption that sensitive company files would flow through it every day. A few adjustments close most of the resulting gap.
Social Media Privacy Settings Worth Actually Checking
Most people set their privacy settings once, when they first join a platform, and never look again — while the platform quietly changes its defaults every few updates.
Identity Theft: Signs and Recovery Steps
Identity theft rarely announces itself. It tends to surface sideways — through a declined loan application, an unfamiliar account, or a call about a debt you never took on.
Online Shopping in South Africa: Where the Risk Actually Hides
The danger in online shopping usually isn't the big, obvious scam — it's the small moments of convenience where you trade a bit of caution for speed.
Recognizing Phishing Emails: A Field Guide
Phishing emails have gotten harder to spot at a glance, but the underlying tactics haven't changed much. Here's what to actually look for, beyond the outdated 'watch for spelling mistakes' advice.
Cyber Safety Habits That Actually Stick
Most cybersecurity advice fails for a simple reason: it asks you to remember something instead of asking you to change something you already do. Here's a version built around habits, not checklists.
Choosing a Password Manager: What to Look For
The advice to 'use a unique password for every account' is correct and also impossible to follow without help. A password manager is the tool that makes it actually practical.
Two-Factor Authentication Explained (And Why It's Worth the Extra Tap)
A password proves you know something. Two-factor authentication adds proof that you also have something — usually your phone. That combination is what actually stops most account takeovers.
Find what matters to you.
Questions worth asking.
A few things worth knowing about Cyber Conduct Insights and the thinking behind the publication.
What is Cyber Conduct Insights?
Cyber Conduct Insights is the editorial publication of Cyber Conduct, covering practical cybersecurity, online safety, privacy, scams, emerging technology, digital citizenship and everyday technology.
Who is the publication for?
It is written for everyday people, families, students, professionals and small businesses who want to understand the digital world without needing to be cybersecurity experts.
Is everything here about cybersecurity?
Not always. Cybersecurity is a major focus, but Cyber Conduct also looks at privacy, digital behaviour, technology, artificial intelligence and the practical decisions people make online.
When did Cyber Conduct begin?
The work began in 2020, during the beginning of COVID-19 in South Africa, as Digital Citizenship — inspired by one of the modules that started the project. It evolved into Tech Citizenship, then Cyber Conduct, and today continues as Cyber Conduct Insights.
Is this the same as the original Cyber Conduct blog?
This publication builds on that earlier work while giving it a new editorial home. Older material remains part of the project's history, while this site focuses on a more curated and contemporary publication.