What is Security?

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tom

Current Landscape

In todays modern, and everchanging world how can people funny understand if they are secure, and even if they are secure what must be done in order to stay on top of this “secure status”? Currently, over 50 new vulnerabilities are discovered every single day, its a landscape that stops for no one or nothing.

Many home users are extremely susceptible to attack, with many not knowing much about vulnerabilities or even if they do, many do not care enough to find a way to combat this. This was one of the many things that I learnt while creating my final year university project NashNetworkScanner. Education on this specific area is a major issue.

Passwords are like underwear: don’t let people see it, change it very often, and you shouldn’t share it with strangers

Chris Pirillo

What needs to be done?

Passwords.

The main area in which users commonly trip up is passwords with over 60% of US adults (Vojinovic, 2022) incorporating words from their social media accounts into their passwords. This allows for a common attacker to gather this information with ease severely weakening their overall password strength.

A good password consists of these key points:

  • Longer then 8 Characters, 12 or more is preferable.

  • Contains:

    • Number

    • Letter, upper and lowercase

    • Special Character

  • Not be reused.

  • Not to contain common words e.g “Password“

2FA

2FA or Two Factor Authentication for many is classed as a hindrance and due to this reason stays disabled. This needs to change. Many providers do not require that users use 2FA nor do many give the user many options as to what type of 2FA they would like to use with many just defaulting to using SMS authentication which is proven to be less secure then TOTP based authentication such as Google Authenticator.

Vulnerability Assessment.

In order to ensure that vulneraries become a thing of the past a few distinct changes will need to occur. Firstly, in order to ensure users understand what is going on, education will need to become more prevalent. Secondly, vulnerability assessment will have to become more accessible to the home users, as many modern tools are highly overwhelming and not intuitive.

Why is this such a big issue?

As more and more people fall victim to cyber attacks it gives the people instigating the attacks more reason to do so, almost a reward as such as they know what they are doing works, this is why technical security is such a big issue, many people in the modern world have gaps within their security posture for a manner of different areas such as:

Bad Passwords and Reused Passwords

Poor Wi-Fi Security

Lack of Encryption on Devices

Not using 2FA

Future Landscape?

Nobody will really know where this world will take the Cyber landscape into the future. However, what is known is that cyber attacks against people will not die out. There will always be criminals and there will always be money in data. So the question is are you 100% sure are “Secure”?

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