You probably know someone who’s had their Netflix hacked. It starts with a login from Moldova. Then your favourite shows get replaced with obscure Czech sitcoms. It’s unsettling, sure, but easy enough to fix. Change your password. Kick them out. Move on.
But the line between that and something far worse? It’s thinner than you think.
Most of us treat digital security like we treat brushing our teeth after a night out: optional, forgettable, and vaguely annoying. Until something hurts. Until a “small” breach suddenly means someone’s emptied your savings, locked your medical records, or is impersonating you to scam your friends.
Cyber security isn’t about paranoia. It’s about realism. The uncomfortable truth is that the internet was never designed to be safe. It was designed to be open. Collaborative. Optimistic, even. And we’re still paying for that idealism.
In 2024, more than 75% of all organisations experienced at least one successful cyberattack. Phishing, ransomware, credential stuffing, SIM swapping — the methods shift, but the message stays the same: if you’re online, you’re a target.
And it’s not just big businesses or celebrities. Ordinary people are increasingly valuable to hackers because we are easier. Less protected. More likely to use the same password across five logins. More likely to store sensitive data on cloud platforms we haven’t checked the privacy settings on since 2017.
We scroll, shop, bank, argue, flirt, and confide online — all while broadcasting our IP addresses and clicking “accept all” without a second thought. It’s like shouting your ATM pin in a crowded bar and hoping no one writes it down.
That’s where simple tools come in — and where a good VPN quietly does some heavy lifting. By masking your IP address and encrypting your traffic, a VPN adds a layer of invisibility to your digital life. It’s not magic, and it doesn’t solve everything, but it makes you harder to profile, track, or exploit.
The key, though, is to treat it like a seatbelt, not a superhero cape. A VPN won’t save you from reusing passwords or clicking a link promising "free crypto in your area." It won’t undo the damage of uploading sensitive documents to a fake job site. But when combined with better habits — password managers, two-factor authentication, actually reading those suspicious emails with your critical brain turned on — it makes a difference.
Planet VPN, for example, offers a simple, user-friendly option for people who don’t want to get lost in technical jargon. No spammy sales pitches. No flashy claims. Just a tool that helps you stay a little less visible in a world increasingly built to watch you.
But even as tools evolve, the biggest shift still needs to happen inside our heads. Because cyber security isn’t just tech — it’s mindset. It’s about accepting that your online self is you. That protecting your data, your conversations, your photos, your preferences, is not vanity. It’s hygiene.
Most of us wouldn’t leave our house without locking the door. So why do we leave our lives online wide open, day after day?
Somewhere along the way, we normalised the idea that privacy was an old-fashioned virtue. That being watched was the cost of convenience. That nothing truly bad could happen to us. But that illusion is crumbling fast. And rebuilding a safer digital world — one where trust, accountability, and autonomy are the defaults — will require more than new tech.
It will take citizens who care enough to learn, enough to question, enough to resist the idea that the digital world is someone else’s responsibility. Because it isn’t. It’s ours.
And it always has been.
