When you go to college, you have enough on your plate as it is. Having to worry about your personal details or being the victim of a cyberattack is not something that you need to deal with.
Unfortunately, the threats are growing daily and with more and more of your details, you have to sharpen up on your computer security to protect yourself from an attack. Most people are ignorant of the skill of hackers and don’t think that they will ever be on the wrong side of identity theft or phishing.
So, what can you do to protect yourself by knowing about cybersecurity essentials to decrease your online vulnerability?
Raise cybersecurity awareness
Have you ever wondered how your phone miraculously display adverts about products you have talked about? You might have given permission for apps to access your phone’s hardware unknowingly.
The problem is that you don’t read the terms and conditions, and let’s face it, almost no one reads the terms and conditions or use because it is so long and often confusing.
People are largely unaware of how open their devices are to people who know how to access it. The biggest problem for college students is when they access websites that aren’t safe.
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Implement cyber policy
Cyber policies are of the utmost importance and should be implemented and maintained at college. For you to protect academic writings, you cannot just rely on 3rd generation policy standards. When floppy disks came out in the 1980s, viruses were the first cyberattacks that were recorded.
In the mid-1990s, data and network security were put to the test and firewalls were developed to counter the attacks. Then in the early 2000s, applications, browsers, and networks were the main cyber targets.
This was when network intrusion detection was developed. In 2010, cyber-attacks were embedded in malware in emails, documents and images and these attacks were then sandboxed to keep them from spreading.
Today, ransomware, phishing and content exploitation is the new focus of attacks and they happen on a broad scale. The problem is that most companies and colleges only have security up to the third generation of attacks.
Use trustful resources
Being a student means that you are often cash strapped and buying your software and other textbooks can become challenging. Many students are then tempted to use pirated software and download resources that come from shady websites.
When you use these resources, you open yourself up for cyberattacks as the people who want your information, embed viruses and other nasty surprises in the dodgy resources.
It might seem like you are in a tight spot and that you don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on legit resources. The alternative is that you could end up losing much more than just a couple of hundred bucks if you thought you were going to save it. It’s much better to go out a bit less than find yourself in a very tight spot.
Creating strong passwords
Have you ever wondered why you are asked whether you are a robot when you visit certain websites? We compete on the web with robots that scour the internet for information.
The security questions on these sites are made so that it is easy for a human to solve, but near impossible for a robot. The same strategy should also be applied to your personal password.
It is difficult to remember all your different passwords, but building strong ones will protect you from those same scouring robots who are programmed to figure out and use your password.
Making a strong password which contains upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters work the best. The combinations are just too vast and the chances of a robot figuring it out are very slim.
Personal cybersecurity should be a very high priority if you don’t want to fall victim to a cyberattack. These attacks don’t discriminate between a large corporation and a small business or an NGO or a government setup. These attacks are random and can come at any time.
Most of the time you aren’t even aware that your info has been stolen, but the effects of the theft could bite you later on. The best course of action is to be proactive and set your defenses before an attempt is made on your information.