The ongoing uncertainty in the-world-at-large (just choose your area of concern...) is probably going to increase the risk of cyber attacks, so what can you do to reduce your risks of being affected?

Photo by olieman.eth on Unsplash

Here are 5 practical things to do. 1-4 apply to individuals or corporates, 5 is probably developers only...

1. This is a good time to check your backup processes. Many people just make backups and never check that they can do a restore successfully. Get an old computer and try to restore some files to it. You would be surprised at how many people find problems with their backup process just by trying to do a restore. 

2. Spear-phishing and phishing attacks, via email, texts and other messaging services, can give bad guys a foot-hold into breaching your systems. Make sure that everyone in your family, group or company knows not to click on links in emails, texts or messages. It doesn’t matter how important the sender is, or how urgent it sounds, or how great the offer is, don’t fall for it - don’t click on links!

3. If you have been putting off 2FA or MFA, then now is a good time to implement it. Two Factor authentication, or Multi-Factor Authentication are very good ways of making it much harder for someone to attack your systems. They take a few minutes to add, and make you much more secure against attack.

4. The tension in the world is a good opportunity to get people to change to a Password Manager, and to implement stronger, longer passwords - and a different one for every service. Yep - different for everything!

5. For developers, the news of the Anonymous hacking of Russian IT systems has probably led to an increased interest in cyber security. Visit https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/ as your first step towards making your code more secure. Visit https://owasp.org/www-project-juice-shop/ to start learning about how to make your web-apps more secure.   

And a word from me as one of the leaders of the Suffolk Chapter of OWASP:

The OWASP® Foundation works to improve the security of software through its community-led open source software projects, hundreds of chapters worldwide, tens of thousands of members, and by hosting local and global conferences. The Suffolk Chapter has lots of videos on a wide range of cyber security topics: https://owasp.org/www-chapter-suffolk/  and we also do live demos of pen testing software, as well as live discussion on many security topics...

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