Are you cyber aware?

Poll

Are you cyber aware?

Sometimes I think about how much of my life is in my smart phone… and then it terrifies me. I love the convenience of having everything I need in the palm of my hand, but also, what would happen if someone got hold of that?

What sorts of things do you do to make sure your information and privacy is protected?

What advice would you give to help someone be secure online?

How cyber aware are you? Find out your score here!

Reply 1

GiantKiwi

19

Original post by BlinkyBill

Sometimes I think about how much of my life is in my smart phone… and then it terrifies me. I love the convenience of having everything I need in the palm of my hand, but also, what would happen if someone got hold of that?

What sorts of things do you do to make sure your information and privacy is protected?

What advice would you give to help someone be secure online?

How cyber aware are you? Find out your score here!

Only problem with that quiz? The first question.

Installing all the latest apps and updates immediately isn't always that great a piece of advice to be given. Take Apple for example, the last 6 updates on MacOS have had an average of 2 CVE's discovered with them within 2 weeks of release.

Or Microsoft last month, pushed out a critical security update that caused endless boot loops on some systems.

Password's ideally want to be a minimum of 12 characters nowadays, to guarantee longevity, as everything up to and including 10 characters is already insecure, and randomised character passwords of 10 characters or below have all been cracked already.

And the biggest threat to password security is not people trying to get at it with brute force attacks, but by using social engineering, as it is considerably easier to achieve a quick result. Just take a look at the whole MP shared password debacle a few months back.

OP

Original post by GiantKiwi

Only problem with that quiz? The first question.

Installing all the latest apps and updates immediately isn't always that great a piece of advice to be given. Take Apple for example, the last 6 updates on MacOS have had an average of 2 CVE's discovered with them within 2 weeks of release.

Or Microsoft last month, pushed out a critical security update that caused endless boot loops on some systems.

Password's ideally want to be a minimum of 12 characters nowadays, to guarantee longevity, as everything up to and including 10 characters is already insecure, and randomised character passwords of 10 characters or below have all been cracked already.

And the biggest threat to password security is not people trying to get at it with brute force attacks, but by using social engineering, as it is considerably easier to achieve a quick result. Just take a look at the whole MP shared password debacle a few months back.

You raise really interesting points here. Can you tell me more about what you mean by social engineering effecting password security? I'm intrigued. :beard:

Totally not an exhaustive list, you're right. :smile:

What do you suggest for keeping track of all the passwords you use for all the different things? I have a memory like a sieve, but I also don't want to keep some huge record of my passwords because that doesn't seem safe either.