As Christmas is just around the corner, making sure we’re all staying cyber-safe is immensely important. In this blog, we will walk you through the things you need to do to ensure the security of yourself, your devices, and your closest ones on the holidays.
First off, cyber security and safety is not the same to all people. While some people may consider being “cyber safe” if they use a password manager to log in to websites while Christmas shopping, some may understand cyber safety differently – managers of software teams would be most concerned about keeping their employees informed about the threats that they might face when working, security engineers would be concerned about the software going down, keeping software up to date, and ensuring the integrity of backups, etc.
We will go through the list of things that are important to different people.
Most of us that aren’t in the cyber security industry, think about cyber security as a way to protect ourselves from malicious parties when performing Christmas shopping. Here are a couple of tips to help protect yourself and your most precious data when doing so:
Software engineers usually look at cyber security from a different perspective, and that’s understandable – after all, working with software is their day-to-day job. Many software engineers would probably already have a couple of plugins running within their browser to stay safe, some of them might be aware of the capabilities provided by password managers and use them to generate secure passwords when shopping, some of them may be aware of data leaks and data breaches that have impacted them in the past – as such, providing advice to them is a little different than providing it to cyber-unaware shoppers.
Many software engineers, as well as cyber security professionals, turn their gaze towards cyber security-enhancing tools such as 1Password or LastPass for password management, proxy and VPN solutions to hide their IP address for anonymity and security when shopping, and the BreachDirectory data breach search engine and API capability to better protect their data in the future. Such tools help them shoot a couple of rabbits with one shot:
Security engineers are in a very similar line of work to that of software developers – to stay cyber-safe during Christmas, most of them also employ software solutions that help them shop safely (password managers and VPN solutions come into mind), but the whole picture looks different to them as they tend to look deeper. Aside from the aforementioned things, they also look at the following aspects:
Those who manage software, marketing, or other teams within a company generally are also well-versed in a couple of cyber-security concepts. In many cases, their knowledge is sufficient to protect against basic threats in cyberspace, but they might need some guidance when protecting themselves during Christmas time. While phishing might be familiar to the majority of managers within a wide sphere of companies, not all managers might be aware of the multiple types of phishing that can target a company, etc.
Same with people not falling in any of the aforementioned categories – as such, it’s recommended that they follow the latest developments in cyberspace, install a couple of privacy-preserving plugins into their browsers, and follow the advice given to them by security professionals. Making use of data breach search engines such as the one provided by BreachDirectory will also help them immensely.
In this blog, we have walked you through a couple of measures that you can employ to stay safe around Christmas time. The holidays are full of cheer – don’t let cybercriminals take it away from you! We hope that this blog post has provided you with some valuable information that you can employ to stay safe, stay around the blog for more information on combatting cybercrime, and until next time!
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