Cybersecurity | The Art of Cyber-Space

“Computer security can simply be protecting your equipment and files from disgruntled employees, spies, and anything that goes bump in the night, but there is much more. Computer security helps ensure that your computers, networks, and peripherals work as expected all the time, and that your data is safe in the event of hard disk crash or a power failure resulting from an electrical storm. Computer security also makes sure no damage is done to your data and that no one is able to read it unless you want them to” ― Bruce Schneier.

“There are risks and costs to a program of action — but they are far less than the long range cost of comfortable inaction.” – John F. Kennedy

“What we should actually be doing is thinking about what are our key controls that will mitigate the risks. How do we have those funneled and controlled through the team that we have, how do we work through that in a well formatted, formulated process and pay attention to those controls we have chosen? Not a continual, add more, add more, add more.” — Dr. Chris Pierson, CEO, Binary Sun Cyber Risk Advisors, at SecureWorld Charlotte

How can I stay safe?

Passwords

"Passwords are like underwear: make them personal, make them exotic, and change them on a regular basis.” — overheard at SecureWorld Atlanta

Passwords have become very common in use ranging from an regular email password to banking transactions. Some of the important things to remember while creating a new password are as follows:

Do not use common passwords like animal name, your pet name or personal name.
Do not reuse the same password.
Use 2 factor authentication wherever available.
Ensure that the password is long preferrably 10-16 characters mixing up letters, symbols and numbers.
These are some important pointers to remember

Browsing

Browsing has been one of the biggest platforms to derive information about an individual. Every website is loaded with trackers that can derive the most basic information which is the browser that is being used to the operating system of the machine.

The data derived through cookies helps companies like Google and Facebook to provide efficient services based on preferences at the cost of privacy.

The highlight is it enables to delete the entire cookies and browsing data every time you exit the app which makes it difficult for trackers to obtain more information.

Digital Hygiene

In April 2020, I was reading through one of the interesting articles published by Forbes which highlighted the need to understand and implement digital hygiene. After the pandemic, time has taught us to wash hands for 20 seconds to keep infections away, similarly there are some basic things that can be followed to ensure we stay off cyberattacks.

Not connecting to an open Wi-Fi is one of the most important factor, sharing your handheld devices to a random person

Do not click on any links that you haven’t seen before. Before opening an email check the email address which was used to send it
Never ever ever update/provide any sort of banking related information on any email or a telephone call.
We can take certain precautions which will help us to a great extent but without them, you are at utmost risk of either losing valuables or becoming a victim of a cyberattack.