10/10/2024
October is the annual cybersecurity awareness month for all cybersecurity practitioners and you can be rest assured that azcyberman and Hqube Consulting Limited made it to the International forum.
I continue to play leadership role for Africa Continent in promoting cybersecurity awareness by encouraging individuals, businesses and stakeholders on their collective responsibility as a cyber protector.
Individually, wash of us have a crystal aspect to play in cyber safety. Collectively, we form an unbreakabke defense against online vulnerabilities and threats.
I must however, admit that the cybersecurity culture in the western world, especially as enforced by the GDPR is impressive both from individuals and businesses, regardless of their sizes.
There are lots of emergence threats to encryption, hashing, tokens, and other forms of defence as a result of quantum computing. Hence cybersecurity culture at every spectrum is non-negotiable.
I Will like to bring our attention to few preventive tips to stay ahead of threat actors as you navigate the cyber world:
* Do not be an easy target:- Be very careful of what you post online. This is highly recommended for individuals that post sensitive information about them on every social media.
* Clean Up, it’s all about the data:- This is highly recommended for businesses that collect and process data from the general public e.g customer and citizens data. Such people must adopt document retention policy and make sure they delete data that are no longer needed. Adopting a sound back up policy must also be considered.
* Be careful of Bait:- Baiting has been an instrument to several successful cyber attacks. Example of baiting include, free software downloads make sure it is from a secure site), free or borrowed USB drive, unsolicited email/sms. So, don’t take the bait!!!
* Be careful of free things:- Do not trade your personal information for freebie. When it comes to security, there is nothing for free.
* Stop feeding the Phish:- More often than not, we become victim of phishing attack because we don’t double check. We should desist from sharing sensitive data including card information over email, chat messages or through untrusted websites. Let us take time to review our Credit Card Statements for any fraud alert.
* Protect your system:- kindly ensure that active and updated antivirus, Firewall and Ad-Blocker solutions are running on both enterprise and mobile devices. Don’t play with patches, they are very critical to staying secured.
* Get Shredding:- Shredding culture is very important in an organisation. Social experiment has revealed that employees sometimes write passwords on papers, invoices and sensitive documents like credit card information are printed out on papers. All these contribute to the non-technical vulnerabilities of digital environment.
* Don’t crack the software:- Africa is high on the use of crack software. This is both at Individual and Business level. IT audit conducted by Hqube consulting Limited revealed that reasonable number of small scale businesses and few large organisations make use of cracked or pirated software. Users are advised to desist from this as they often contain Malicious Software.
* Strong password:- Using strong passwords,
difficult for hackers to guess is an important ingredient to staying safe. Passwords are prone to dictionary attack, rainbow attack, session hijack amongst others. Consequently, we must use Passphrase and desist from using same Passphrase across all platforms.
* Public-WiFi:- As I have always say just like every other expert, public WiFi is never a safe haven. Always observe a disclaimer message pop up when you connect to a public WiFi. The message is always, this network is unsecured. Public-WiFi has accounted for a very large number of successful cyber attack through network access. Always use VPN, Turn off sharing, and keep WiFi off if they are not needed.
I am proud to empowers individuals and businesses to protect their data from cybercrime and online safety!!!
azcyberman!!!
