CF media specialists offer tips for cyber security

October is Cyber security Awareness month. Cyber security is the process and practices that are designed to protect networks, devices and information from unauthorized access and viruses. 

“The most common way people get viruses and unauthorized access alerts are through phishing attempts when people write emails to gain access to the device,” instructional coach Kenton Engels said. 

Media specialist Abby Hendrickson said phishing, unfortunately, is a common pitiful to avoid. “Many of the staff members including myself get a lot of phishing attempts through emails, and we need to know which emails are suspicious.” 

Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent message designed to trick a human victim into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious software on the victim’s infrastructure.  

Phishing happened and succeeded here before where a staff member here clicked an email that looked like it was from the principal, but it turns out that it was a phishing tag from a different sender,” Engels said. 

One of the easiest ways to prevent falling prey to online attacks is through strengthening and regularly changing passwords. “Most people’s passwords are too weak and unauthorized access can easily get in,” Engels said.

Most attackers who get into people’s accounts want money, so some of them can hold ransom for the data and information that they got accessing your account. The information/data that is held for ransom is called ransomware.  

“Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but that is rare these days and occur usually in virus attacks. If it’s unauthorized access, you will need to change all your password accounts and cancel everything you can. You might also want to use passphrases instead of passwords and use a password manager,” Engels said.  

“People should also be really observant to the emails that they are getting,” Engels said. He also recommends hovering over all the links that are in emails to make sure that they come from valid sights instead of fake ones. 

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