42% of young people, aged 13-18, think more should be done for their safety online (Girlguiding research for Safer Internet Day 2025).

This year’s theme for Safer Internet Day is ‘Too good to be true? Protecting yourself and others from scams online‘. Girls in guiding are growing up in a world with increasingly complex online scams, so the sooner they understand the signs to look out for the better.

Units who take part in Generation CashBack have the opportunity to take part in a lead session – a unit meeting delivered by me, focusing on everyday leadership skills. There’s a wide range of sessions to choose from – from confidence building and teamwork to everyday sexism or event planning.

In January, I ran a session on cyber resilience and critical thinking with 303^rd A Glasgow Guide Unit. Cyber resilience is all about keeping your digital data safe, building good habits around passwords and being savvy enough to spot and stop scams and phishing attempts.

In this session we did three activities. We used random words to create different passwords and put them into an online password checker to see how secure they were. I then challenged them to make them more secure, by adding in numbers, symbols and capital letters. The girls enjoyed combining the words to make silly passwords and had a lot of questions about how to store and remember passwords.

They then did an activity all about phishing scams, where they used magnetic fishing rods to fish for pieces of paper with all the things you need to look out for in a phishing email written on them, before an activity where we discussed all the different types of people who might see information that they post online.

The Guides said: “I found it fun when we were making new and better passwords” and “I learned who to trust with [my] information. I’ve learned a lot about cyber resilience, thank you.”

My top tips for cyber resilience are to have a different password for every account you have and think before you click on any link messaged to you!

Why not try out some cyber resilience activities in your unit? Check out this toolkit created by one of our CashBack partners, Youth Scotland.