Debesh Choudhury

3 years ago · 2 min. reading time · ~10 ·

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It is Essential to be Always Vigilant About Cyber Threats

It is Essential to be Always Vigilant About Cyber Threats

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How do you take care of personal cybersecurity?


In today's networked cyber world, it is essential to care about personal cybersecurity. Every Internet user must be fully aware of the basics of personal data security and privacy.

The following good practices may give some reliefs from cyber threats

  • Never use the same password for all online accounts: It is challenging to remember many long and complex passwords. So people tend to use the same password for all online accounts. But it can lead to a disastrous situation. If the password is compromised, all your online accounts are gone to the hackers' hands or lost. A single password may turn out to be a “single point of failure.” Many people adopt password managers. But the master password of the password managers may be hacked. Then you lose all your online accounts.
  • Always adopt multiple-factor authentication (MFA): Every Internet user should adopt a second-factor authentication, such as a mobile phone number. This can improve your personal cybersecurity. For example, the Medium login app sends a login link to the emails of respective users. This is a good practice.
  • Avoid storing the passwords in computers and mobile devices: This may be a convenient solution. If your devices are stolen or lost, then all authentication credentials are lost.
  • Change your passwords regularly: We often don’t like to change our passwords. It is a good practice to change the passwords quite often, at least twice a year.
  • Always try to use a privacy-centric web browser: The privacy-centric web browsers, such as Brave browser, can protect you from trackers by blocking ads and tracking signals. The filters of the browsers can safeguard you from hundreds of online tracking.
  • You may opt for privacy-centric search engines: The privacy-centric search engines don’t save any search data and feed advertisers. One such search engine is DuckDuckGo.
  • After completing online works, log off from the online accounts: This may turn out to be inconvenient to log in with the credentials every time you log in. But it reduces the chances of hacking your online accounts.
  • Use only very essential and trusted mobile apps: Most of us are used to download and install any mobile app without any hesitation. Mobile apps are excellent data collecting funnels for the advertisers. Even you have to use any mobile app, and please take care to give only the minimum permission to the mobile app. This way, we can safeguard our personal and private data.
  • Always protect your wireless router with a strong password: Quite often, we forget to safeguard our wireless router. Some people keep it with the default factory-set password, such as 1234 or ‘password,’ which is very vulnerable. We must set the wireless router with a strong password.
  • Never opt for password-less hype: You may observe many advertisements for password-less login. Why should you go for an automatic authentication process that doesn’t require to take your authentication credentials every time you log in?

All the above jobs are not easy to accomplish regularly. If you can follow these steps, your online presence may start to get better security and privacy.

Do you have any other opinions? Please write that in the comment section.


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Text Copyright © 2020 Debesh Choudhury — All Rights Reserved

I am a solution architect for Digital Identity, Data Privacy, Password & Cybersecurity, Distributed Ledgers, IoT, a Researcher & Academician of Electronics, Computer Eng. & IT. I am Co-Founder of “The Unfluencers ” LinkedIn Group and Senior Member of IEEE & SPIE.

Join my private email list for helpful, yet often unusual, insights.

Comments

Hitoshi Kokumai

3 years ago #3

#1
Thanks for calling me out. I would like to emphasize that there are many options to be added on top of the secret credentials. But we can not think of any valid options that can displace the secret credentials.

Debesh Choudhury

3 years ago #2

#1
Yes, graphical passwords are stronger than text passwords.

Zacharias 🐝 Voulgaris

3 years ago #1

Although passwords are a necessity of sorts for many cybersecurity systems, they are not the only option. Yes, you can create a pretty decent password if needed, one that no human being in the world would be able to remember, but doesn't that also make it a liability since you'll have to store it somewhere? (hopefully not on a post-it note!) Perhaps having actually computer files as passwords would be more practical, for high-level security. Alternatively, you can have an image-based authentication system, like the one developed by Hitoshi Kokumai. In any case, there are lots of options for cybersecurity, complementary to the great tips offers in this article. Cheers

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