Celebrating Cybersecurity Awareness Month by Protecting Your Data
Cybersecurity best practices to help you protect your data all year long.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and the message this year is “If you connect it, protect it.”
For that reason, this month we’re taking time to celebrate cybersecurity by giving you tips on how to secure and protect your personal data. We’ll also be sharing tips and highlights throughout the month so keep an eye out!
Follow us on social media or subscribe to our Privacy Please newsletter to stay up to date on things coming out this month.
- Cybersecurity expert interviews. Check out our Privacy in Action interviews with hacker and comic book creator Robert Willis, cybersecurity expert at Shutterstock and author John Jackson, and Cyber Pop-up CEO Dr. Christine Izuakor.
- A roundup of the biggest hacks in the last 10 years. Have you been hacked? Tell us about your experience.
- Sharing a list of our favorite privacy and cybersecurity tools. What’s in your toolbox?
Why You Should Care About Cybersecurity
Anything with an Internet signal can be hacked – from your coffee maker to your social media accounts and business accounts.
We’re not kidding about the coffee maker – a hacker recently reverse-engineered a coffee maker to see what kinds of hacks he could do with it. Turns out, he could control the coffee maker and make it display a ransom message. You can watch a video of the hack here.
While the coffee marker hack experiment is rather silly, the truth behind cybercrime is that it costs individuals and companies billions of dollars every year. McAfee found the annual cost of cybercrime grew from $80 billion in 2013 to about $600 billion in 2018. With COVID-19 increasing cybercrime, it’s expected the cost will rise in 2020.
If you’re not actively protecting yourself, you could be at risk of becoming a victim of a hacker and it could affect your wallet.
How to Protect Your Data: From Privacy to Cybersecurity
Both privacy and cybersecurity are about your relationship with your personal data, devices, and networks. The idea behind data privacy is that you should be in control of your personal data. You choose if you want to share your data, what data, with whom, when, and where. Cybersecurity is about defending your personal data.
If you use privacy by design products and limit the amount of personal data you share, you’re already many steps closer to securing your data. To check out privacy tools recommendations, check out ThinkPrivacy and PrivacyTools.
Here are a few cybersecurity best practices to help you protect your data:
- Use privacy by design products and services, always evaluating their privacy policy.
- Be on alert about smart devices: what data they collect and what 3rd parties they are connected with.
- Avoid sharing personal data online.
- Check that links are legitimate before clicking on them.
- Update software regularly.
- Limit access to administrator accounts and data.
- Check to see if your accounts have been breached: https://haveibeenpwned.com/
- Sign up to receive the latest scam alerts.
To learn more about types of cyber attacks and how to protect yourself from hackers, check out the Startpage guide.
Got your own cybersecurity tip? Share it with us on social media.
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