The weakest link in the cybersecurity chain is almost always people, and the greatest threat to your own cybersecurity is likely yourself and the members of your family.
Realizing That You’re a Target Perhaps the most significant first step in securing yourself digitally is to understand that you’re a target and that nefarious parties have the desire to breach your computer systems, electronically accessible accounts, and anything else they can get their hands on. Even if you already realize that you’re a target, make sure to fully internalize such a notion. People who truly believe that criminals want to breach their computers and phones act differently than people who do not fully appreciate this reality and whose lack of scepticism sometimes leads them into trouble.
WARNING
Because your family members can also impact your digital security, they also need to be aware that they are potential targets. If your children take unwise risks online, they may inadvertently inflict harm not only on themselves but upon you and other members of the family as well. In some cases, attackers have managed to attack people’s employers via remote connections that were compromised because children misused computers on the same networks as computers that the employees were using for working remotely.
The threat posed by such attacks is usually not that a criminal will directly steal someone’s money or data, but rather that some party will seek to harm the target in some other manner that may ultimately translate into some form of financial, military, political, or other benefits to the attacker and (potentially) damage of some sort to the victim.
Securing Your External Accounts
We discussed how you can acquire your own technology products. But using these products isn’t enough to keep your cybersecurity as you, no doubt, have digital data of significant value that is stored outside of your own physical possession. That is, outside of data systems and data stores under your control.
In fact, data about every person living in the western world today is likely stored on computer systems belonging to many businesses, organizations, and governmental agencies. Sometimes those systems reside within the facilities of the organizations to which they belong, sometimes they’re located at a shared data centre, and, sometimes the systems themselves are virtual machines rented from a third-party provider. Additionally, some such data may reside in cloud-based systems offered by a third party.
Such data can be broken down and divided into many different categories, depending on which aspects of it a person is interested in. One way of examining the data for the purposes of discovering how to secure it, for example, is to group it according to the following scheme:
- Accounts, and the data within them, that a user established and controls
- Data belonging to organizations that a user has willingly and knowingly interacted with, but the user has no control over the data
- Data in the possession of organizations that the user has never knowingly established a relationship with
Addressing the risks of each type of data requires a different strategy.
- Securing Data Associated with User Accounts
- Securing Data with Parties That You’ve Interacted With
- Securing Data at Parties That You Haven’t Interacted With
There is more to take about the types in depth. We will do that in our next post.
Cybersecurityworld 