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In the year 2024, the Internet has come to dominate nearly every aspect of daily life — work, entertainment, research — you name it, it’s somewhere online. While having so much information made accessible is a boon for the sake of convenience, it also introduces new avenues for bad actors to interfere with, steal, or even destroy your personal information for their own ends. As such, it’s more important than ever to be technologically literate and have some cursory familiarity with cybersecurity, such as a VPN or antivirus software.
Defining Cybersecurity and its Components
Cybersecurity is a relatively new phenomenon and therefore isn’t always common knowledge. Many experts break cybersecurity down into three principles: integrity, availability, and confidentiality.
Integrity refers to the process of ensuring data remains accurate, trustworthy, and protected against any kind of unauthorized modification, including destruction. This component is important since failing to maintain integrity damages an individual or entity’s reputation, thereby affecting change in other ways. On an individual scale, integrity attacks can lead to stolen information like the routing number for a bank account.
Availability is more fundamental, as it simply refers to whether a given system or network can be accessed at a given point in time. Without availability, those networks can’t be accessed, which is what deliberate cyberattacks like denial-of-service (DoS) attacks can lead to.
Lastly, confidentiality refers to measures put in place to keep data private. While complete online anonymity is extremely difficult to achieve, privacy is attainable through applications like a VPN or antivirus software. The information these programs protect includes medical records, account login info, social security numbers, and other important personal information. Human error is unfortunately common when it comes to failures in keeping information confidential.
Types of Cyberattacks
Because a large portion of cyberattacks occur due to human error, such as using a weak password or leaving a workstation on and unattended, it’s important to understand what types of cyberattacks there are and what weaknesses they attempt to exploit. Preventing human error is among the most effective methods of preventing a cyberattack.
Ransomware is an increasingly prevalent form of cyberattack wherein malware, a “malicious software” designed to access or damage a device, is used to encrypt, lock, and destroy personal files upon gaining access to a system. Hackers use ransomware to extort money from those they hack with the promise of restoring the locked data.
Phishing, a form of social engineering, is a method of cybercrime by which hackers will contact you via email or social media posing as someone trustworthy, like a family member or financial institution. The messages these hackers send often ask you to click on a link or access some website through a URL for seemingly innocuous reasons. Once you interact with these links, you’ll be taken to a fake website where the hackers will access your personal information.
IoT-attacks, or attacks on objects connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart TVs, thermometers, and doorbells, are a kind of attack people tend to not think about since they don’t have as much of a human element involved. Objects on the IoT can be hacked since users tend to forget to install antivirus software on them, allowing hackers access to other items connected to the IoT, including phones and computers.
These are just a few of the many different types of cyberattacks, but it’s important to note that many of them are made possible by unintended carelessness. Fortunately, there are practices available to make yourself less vulnerable to these attacks, both in terms of habits to avoid and programs to install.
Practices and Programs to Keep Your Data Safe
Although it can seem intimidating at first, good cybersecurity practices often boil down to having a healthy amount of skepticism about any links or information you see online that you’re not 100% certain about. Another basic practice is keeping in mind where your information is going; the Internet is a big place, and if you voluntarily provide someone sensitive information online, it’s not unlikely that the information will eventually leave its target audience.
On a more technical note, be wary of who you communicate with online and what information you share with them if you’re not certain they are who they say. You’ll also want to avoid pop-ups and unknown emails/links, as these are popular avenues for phishing and ransomware attacks. It is worth taking the extra steps: download a secure browser, turn on your VPN, access an encrypted email, be sure who you’re talking to when you’re chatting online.
Password protection is another difficult aspect of cybersecurity for many people because it can be frustrating to memorize long chains of random numbers, letters, and characters. That being said, strong passwords are often the barrier keeping your personal information safe, so they are worth taking seriously. A strong password should include at least 10 characters and have a combination of numbers, symbols, and letters which differ in capitalization.
You should also change out your passwords every so often to keep your systems as secure as possible, though this can prove especially frustrating. As such, consider looking into a password manager to help organize that information.
Unfortunately, not every cyberattack can be prevented simply by avoiding sketchy links and using good passwords. Several types of protections, such as VPNs, firewalls, and external hard drives, are necessary to supplement your own cybersecurity practices.
VPNs, or virtual private networks, work to keep your data private while you’re online. These tools are especially useful if you need to access an unsecured WiFi network such as those at coffee shops or restaurants. VPNs do differ in terms of the services they offer, as well as their general usefulness, so make sure to do some research and see which ones suit your needs best.
Firewalls for your home network keep unauthorized users from accessing your information online, monitoring network traffic and enforcing access rules alongside other forms of security.
Finally, external hard drives are useful for backing up your important information in case of a data breach or malware attack. Storing files either offline or in the cloud keeps them out of reach of hackers, and doing so also keeps your files intact should a program on your system go corrupt out of the blue.
Above all else, staying aware of what hackers are capable of and how they can access your information is generally the best defense against potential cyberattacks. While it’s important to use some technical barriers, diligence and caution will often keep you safe from the majority of trouble you could run into online. Staying educated on the matter will improve your odds of staying safe immeasurably.
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