1. Providers
2. Virgin Media
3. Filters & Parental Controls

With the ever-present risk of online attacks, it is good to know that your broadband provider offers plenty of protection for all your online activities, from shopping to streaming TV.

Virgin Media offers an excellent package of online security, including parental controls and filtering services to keep you and your household safe both at home and when you’re out. From blocking unwanted calls to keeping young children safe online, this guide looks at the security settings offered by Virgin Media for all your devices.

Virgin Media broadband safety and security

Virgin offers an array of online protection software in the form of Web Safe, Child Safe and Internet Security to keep you, your household and all your devices safe both from online attacks and dodgy websites.

Web Safe

Virgin Media Web Safe comes free with any Virgin Media broadband package and provides wifi-level protection for all devices connected to your router. You can switch Web Safe on or off whenever you want, but it comes automatically switched on when you purchase your package. It blocks child-inappropriate websites automatically, and will also detect and block fake banking or shopping websites.

It blocks phishing websites that are designed to collect your personal data for malicious causes as well as any websites that are fraudulent or likely to infect your devices with viruses and other harmful online nasties. The customisable settings allow you to select types of websites to block, as well as adding or removing individual sites as frequently as you want. You will need to log in to your Virgin Media account to access the Web Safe settings for your account.

Bundled up within Web Safe is Child Safe, which automatically blocks any sites that contain child-inappropriate content including pornography, violence, crime, hate, drugs, hacking, suicide and self-harm, and address-hiding. You can choose to also block sites containing gambling, weapons, alcohol and tobacco, and social media. If you wish, you can use the timer feature to only block access to these sites at certain times of day.

Virgin Media Internet Security

Powered by F-Secure, Virgin Media Internet Security offers an additional layer of protection to all your individual devices beyond what is offered by WebSafe. Free to customers for three months, it costs £3 per month thereafter. It will protect your devices both at home and when you’re out offering complete peace of mind.

Once downloaded, it will encrypt your activity when you engage in online banking or shopping in order to protect your bank details. It also offers thorough antivirus protection by scanning anything you download and removing any threats before they reach your device. It will flash up a warning if you click on a link that could take you to a harmful website, and keeps you away from websites that attempt to collect your private information for malicious purposes.

It also enables parents to set controls on individual devices to protect their children from inappropriate websites, in addition to Web Safe which offers wifi-level protection. Note however that it cannot block apps.

Email filtering

Virgin Media Mail allows you to set filters that will automatically move messages into a certain folder, forward messages or mark messages as read. Customers can easily set up their own email filters by clicking on settings and creating a new rule with one or more conditions attached and a specified action to any emails that fulfil the conditions you have stipulated, for example ‘move to trash’.

This handy filtering system makes it easier to organise emails that come in regularly, whether they are marketing emails or just junk you want to move immediately to the trash.

If you think you have received a phishing email, you should forward it immediately to Virgin Media’s dedicated email address – phishing@virginmedia.com. If Virgin finds it is a phishing address you will be notified and Virgin will take action to block any future emails from the sender.

In the event of you accessing a malicious website or clicking a harmful link, Virgin Media will lock your email account to prevent further damage being done. To resolve this problem, you simply need to create a new password and follow the instructions to gain access to your account again.

Parental controls with Virgin Media TV

Just as Virgin offers online protection for its broadband customers, it also enables parents to control what their children can see on TV. To do this, you need to create a PIN which can then be used to restrict access to certain channels, as well as prevent purchases of films and TV shows. It can also be used as a lock on recorded shows. To create a PIN, you need to go to the Help and Settings section on your TV 360 box.

Within the Help and Settings section, parents can also choose to hide all Adult channels in the TV listings by using the PIN so that young family members cannot see them or access them.

To create parental controls for apps accessible on a Virgin Media TV box, such as BBC iPlayer, Netflix, and Amazon, you will need to create a PIN for each streaming app. This can be the same PIN you use for Virgin Media Parental Controls if you wish. To control access to the apps and games accessible on your TV box, you need to visit Help and Settings and Parental Controls. You can then choose to lock (can be released with the PIN), block or leave unlocked the apps and games listed.

Call management and filtering for Virgin Media phone

Although many people no longer use their landline much, for those that do, unsolicited calls can still be a problem. As standard, Virgin offers all its phone customers Number Withhold, which hides your phone number when you make a call, preventing unwanted return calls.

For an extra £3 per month, customers can enjoy additional security measures, including Anonymous Caller Rejection, which blocks callers that hide their number, and Call Divert which will redirect your calls to another number if you wish, meaning you need not miss a call if you’re out.

Parental controls for Virgin Media Mobile

Virgin Media not only offers comprehensive parental controls for your home wifi, it also enables you to keep a degree of control on what your little darlings are looking at on their mobile phone.

By logging in to your child’s Virgin Media Mobile account, you can switch on Parental Control. You can choose to block access to all adult sites that require a user to be age 18, including gambling sites, block access to social media, and also block access to specific sites you do not want your child to visit.

Just bear in mind that the Parental Control settings for mobile devices can take around two hours to update so the protection isn’t immediate. We would advise going through this process before you give your son or daughter their mobile phone so the settings are in place from the word go.

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