🔐
Year 8 • Lesson 12

Stay Safe

Passwords, phishing and your privacy settings

One weak password or one clicked phishing link can cause real damage.

🎯 Learning Objectives

  • Create and evaluate strong passwords using passphrase technique
  • Identify phishing attempts using at least 5 warning signs
  • Explain how multi-factor authentication (MFA) works and why it matters

📚 Key Vocabulary

Passphrase
A long password made of random words (e.g. "purple-elephant-taxi-moon")
MFA / 2FA
Multi-factor authentication — a second check beyond the password
Phishing
Fake messages designed to trick you into revealing credentials
Social engineering
Manipulating people (not systems) to gain access
Data breach
When hackers access and steal stored personal data

⏱️ Lesson Timing (50 mins)

🪝
Hook
5 mins

Live demo: teacher goes to haveibeenpwned.com and enters a generic example email. Show students that millions of passwords are already known. "This is what you're up against."

👨‍🏫
Teach
10 mins
  • Password strength: length beats complexity — 4 random words = very strong
  • Password manager: one strong master password manages everything else
  • MFA: something you know + something you have/are
  • Phishing tells: urgency, generic greeting, wrong URL, spelling errors, unexpected attachment
  • Privacy settings: location, who sees your posts, app permissions
🛠️
Create
40 mins

Students work through a phishing detection challenge: given 6 emails/messages, annotate each one identifying legitimate vs phishing, with evidence. Then they create a "Phishing Warning Card" for a younger sibling (visual, clear, useful). Finally, they audit their own social media privacy settings (or a fictional account) using a checklist.

Tools:
Word OnlineCanva
📢
Share
5 mins

Display the best phishing warning cards. What made them effective for the audience?

🔧 Tools & Resources

🤖 AI Angle

AI is increasingly used to make phishing emails more convincing — grammatically perfect, personalised. The red flags are getting harder to spot.

📝 Evidence of Learning

Annotated phishing examples + phishing warning card (exported)

📚 Homework

Audit one account you use. Change the password to a passphrase. Enable MFA if possible. Write a short note: what did you change and why?

⏱️ 15 mins

♿ Differentiation

Support (for students who need help)

Phishing checklist with explicit clues to look for

Extension (for advanced learners)

Research the most expensive cyberattack in UK history. What was the human error that allowed it? What could have prevented it?