How Cyber Aware Are You?

by Ayman Siraj ‘18

October is Cyber Security Awareness month in the United States. The news has been filled a plenty with cyber security news over the past weeks – Equifax got breached recently with the personally identifiable information of 143 million Americans leaked. Yahoo just revealed that all 3 billion of their user accounts were breached in an incident dating back a few years ago. 

As students, we often don’t step back to think about what personal information of ours might be out there. The first time you start paid work, you get your SSN, when you buy something online you use your personal credit card. With all of these breaches happening, what can you do to keep yourself safe online or find out how much of yourself is out there already? Here are five tips that I recommend:

1. Make sure you are using different passwords for your different social media sites. Also make sure they are longer than 10 characters and include lower and uppercase letters, symbols and numbers. A general rule of thumb is that the longer the password, the harder it is to crack. If you have trouble remembering long passwords, use something you can remember – the first two lines of your favorite song, your favorite quote. Those all will work and make sure to maybe change a ‘O’ to a ‘0’ or all ‘a’s to ‘#’, simple changes you can remember. There are many password managers out there that help you manage your passwords as well.

2. Have you ever thought of what about yourself is up there on the internet? Job hunting happens through the internet and just assume at some point of the hiring process, someone from your potential employer will Google you. Google yourself! Just type in your full name and comb through the first few pages of your results. If there are sites that you think that shouldn’t be there, log in to your profile on that site and change the privacy settings. There are sites that can scan your social media for potential content that you wouldn’t want to be publicly available.

3. Chances are your account details and information has been dumped on the internet from a hack of a service you used or still use. A great way to check is to use Experian’s free deep web email scanner. Another great way to check if you have an account that has been compromised in a breach is a website called Have I Been Pwned?

4. One of the best ways of securing your online accounts is to use 2FA or Two Factor Authentication. Two factor authentication ensures that you are the one actually logging into your account when using a new device by sending either a text or email message with a verification code, a push request to a pre-verified device. USC supports two factor authentications via an app called Duo and most sites that you would use on regular basis such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat & Amazon do as well – get 2FA set up on all those accounts. You can also use this site to check which sites support 2FA.

5. Think before you click! Many people unknowingly divulge their personal information via bogus forms or by download malicious files. Always hover over a hyperlink to make sure it is taking you to right website. The bad guys often use amazon-pay.com instead of amazon.com asking you to pay for something. Being vigilant is the best defense to protect your own data. Also, if an attachment looks or seems suspicious – it probably is. Please don’t download it just to see what it is. USC provides us with free Sophos Endpoint Security, so download it on your system. You have no excuse not to!

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