B is for Burglar!!!

We lock our doors, have burglar alarms for our houses but we leave the biggest door open. The door which cyber criminals have used time and again to steal our credit card information, personal identities and other valuable data.

I happened to read a cartoon which said: “Don’t underestimate the I.Q of crooks “. It made me ponder about the loop holes and the ever prevalent issues of Cyber Security which have bogged the society in the current times.

In August 2013, hackers supposedly disrupted the NASDAQ trading market and the market had to be shut off for more than 3 hours. A problematic issue showed up in a quote processing system which brought the technical glitch into light. This issue instigated a lot of questions arising in the minds of the investors who now doubt the over dependence on technology for their trading. This kind of attack could be performed at the blink of an eye by a person who is miles away. There are several other breaches which are possible like the attacker could alter the trading algorithm which in turn could cause the market to crash. The worldwide impact would be unimaginable if at all a cyber-attacker could gain access to NASDAQ computers.

As a matter of face we are prone to cyber-attack all the time. We use Cloud services, smart phones for internet banking, social networking sites to interact with friends all over the world. All this has only complicated the process of achieving cyber security. The world is more interconnected today that it was before the era of Smartphones and Internet.

How do you protect yourselves from Cyber crimes??

• Install a good Anti-Virus program on your   PC and smart-phones which detects viruses and removes them. 
• Set really complex and strong passwords 
• Try not to open mails from unknown sources. Also prevent opening attachments in mails from unknown sources.
• Do not download "exe" files from the internet and be careful about the websites that you visit and the links that you click.

• 
   Limit the amount of personal information that is posted online. Also use privacy settings to ensure personal information is not shared across everyone.
• Be cautious about online deals. If it is too good to be true then probably it's not true! 
• It's important to ensure that your computer and routers are installed with good firewalls. 
• Public WiFi's send data which is not encrypted so avoid using Public WiFi connections.

How do you choose the right password??

• Create a password with minimum of 8 characters. The longer the better!

• Choose a series of random words which are easy to remember but tough to break.

• Have an alphanumeric password and also add some special characters to make a complex password.

• Use a mixture of upper and lower case alphabets since passwords are case sensitive.

What not to do while choosing passwords?

• Do not choose obvious passwords like name, date of birth or other related personal details

• Don't choose a complex password which you cannot remember.

• Do not choose an English word as a password. Crooks can perform the dictionary attack and break your password.

• Do not choose only alphabets or numerals and do no choose passwords of length less than 8 characters.

     With all this taken care of these is just one last thing that you need to do!!

And finally : Lock your Computer!!                                                                                 

      References : 

             http://kb.iu.edu/data/akln.html

                   http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6568387

                   http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6284146

                   http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/22/us-nasdaq-halt-tapec-idUSBRE97L0V420130822

                   http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-a-Secure-Password