Welcome to DR's note, your weekly dose of knowledge from Circuit Stitch.

This week we will talk about Cyberattacks and how to protect against them.

   

To start off this week's DR's note, I want to share something I overheard while out getting dinner one night.  The TV was on the news at this place and patrons were talking to each other and watching the TV.  I overheard someone say “Cyberattacks, why should we care about that cyberattacks?”  That person then was just spouting off nonsense about a topic he knew nothing about.  To be a little honest, I do live in an area that is not full of super high dollar industries.  But that doesn't mean we can just bury our heads in the sand to the plight of the cyber world and its effects on our everyday lives.  If you remember just last years the Colonial pipeline that got attacked with ransomware and temporarily shut it down.  The cyberattacks don't necessarily go after individuals, though they do use social engineering on individuals at companies to help them gain access.  It is a very scary thing to have happened, but if you are ready and knowledgeable, then you have less of a chance of falling victim to these cyberattacks or scams.

    Let us look into steps that you can take to shield yourself against potential cyberattacks.  First off, make sure all your devices are up-to-date with the latest software.  When your device is up-to-date it will have the latest security patches, this will help keep you secure.  These patches are important because someone found a vulnerability that the software manufacture needed to fix with the security patch.  Basically, it is a hole in your system that a hacker can use to get in and gain info.  Next, never give any sensitive data (SS number, Pin number, credit card number, etc) over text, email, messenger app, etc.  If someone hacks that site and views chat logs, then they will see what ever sensitive data you sent in plain text that they can then use.  Now the hacker will not be scouring each message with there own eyes to look for this data, no, they will have a program run through millions of messages in a matter of minutes. Lastly, for this week it is, passwords, you should not use the same password for multiple accounts.  You should also make it complex, let me show you some examples; Password (this is too easy, and they have this in every word list for any brute force hack), *p^2Sw0rd*(this looks similar to password but is more complex and therefore much harder to crack).  You don't need to get crazy with the amount of complexity, but just change up one or two things so that it is not easily guessed.  There is more you can do to help protect yourself, but I feel that if you do just these three, you are on a more solid foundation than most people out there. 

    If you have a question or a topic you'd like me to discuss, feel free to leave a comment below. Thank you and have a great week.