information security - How to Secure your data

Nowadays Information security plays a vital role in our day to day life. Especially the social media have gone main-stream among the teenagers. Starting from sharing personal information with your friends and connecting with new people, online banking, and online shopping have been trending. While posting the personal data online users are vulnerable for threats, therefore let’s consider the rising threats which are coupled with these trends and the article will highlight how to mitigate these attacks.  

First of all let’s dig into the social network. People post sensitive data such as pictures, connect with strangers, chatting and messaging strangers that you have never met before.   Anyone with a malicious intention can deceive people and tempt them to revile sensitive personal data, which will be used for scams and even blackmailing people.  So let’s see how we can mitigate this. First of all control the visibility of your sensitive data. Do not revel your sensitive data in the public domain, use the data visibility option in social networks to protect your private data and stop listing it in search engines for public access. Also it is very important to be concern whom do you add on social networks as a friend. Best practices do not add strangers. Most of the social network attacks are based on deception which is also called as Social Engineering.  This can be used to perform identity thrift and steal your virtual presence.

When we look into online payment fraud, credit card fraud, banking fraud and social network password hacking attempts a technique called phishing is frequently used. The base of this attack is creating an identical web page of the original web site and tricking the user to enter the user credentials such as the username and the password. For instance you will receive an email from facebook which contains a link to win a free iPhone. The temptation is irresistible so the users will click the link and it will land into a page which is similar to facebook and the user will enter the user’s credentials, which is accounted by an attacker. To mitigate this we have to click links with caution. Also by analyzing the URL we can easily segregate the fake facebook login page from the original. ( http://www.facebook.com) because even though the attacker can create an identical page they cannot manipulate the URL. Couple of other factors to consider while doing an online payment is to look whether the URL changes for HTTPS, which is a secure socket layer. So the data transfer between the server and your PC such as bank logins, credit card detail is encrypted. The attacker who uses to monitor your internet traffic using an attack such as sniffing will not have access to your bank login or credit card details. We can use some core level guidelines such as installing a viruses guard and updating it frequently to shield your data against viruses, Trojans houses and worms. Also using strong passwords or making your password bomb proof will protect you from brute force attacks. To strengthen the passwords use at least one upper case, one lower case, one number and special symbol character while exceeding the password length of 8 characters.

No system is perfect in fact only way to make it safe by locking the computer in a safe and barring it underground.

Author - Shariyaz Abdeen
http://lk.linkedin.com/in/shariyaz
 shariyaz1@gmail.com