US urges 'cyber hygiene' effort
Summary:This year for National Cyber Security Awareness month the Homeland Security Department urges people to be more careful with phishing emails. These emails are sent to people with the intent to obtain people's personal information such as social security numbers and bank details. Attacks are not just targeted at individuals, but corporations and with the use of social networking sites it has become very easy for these people to forge "legitimate" emails.
Response:
The concerns addressed by the Homeland Security Department are not anything new, but they are still relevant and important. The tips provided by the Homeland Security Department are, in my opinion, obvious. The idea of a "shared responsibility" is interesting and implies that individuals are not just putting themselves at risk when they are careles with their emails, but to their coworkers and/or family.
People should really be more careful to prevent these exploitations and I believe that the government and private corporations should take steps to protect people who are oblivious of such threats. Programs should be set up to inform and educate people about such threats. This is the only way I believe that people would be protected in the long term.
ReplyDeleteThe unfortunate thing is many people are quite careless when they're online with their personal information and when opening emails. Especially in a network setting like an office, viruses can easily spread throughout the network and so it is imperative that everybody use the utmost care when opening emails, particularly those from unknown senders. As much as I'd like to say that people simply don't have common sense, I think the deeper-rooted problem here is that a lack of face-to-face contact with people appears to have little affect on their trust in people at times (which can lead to problems since the opposite should be true: a lack of face-to-face contact should illicit less trust).
ReplyDelete