GEORGE NEWS & VIDEO - Personal cyber security in the Garden Route is of paramount importance, says Jayson E. Street, globally recognised speaker and author of Dissecting the Hack. Street was brought to George by Eden Office of Cyber Security and addressed guests at a get-together at Primi Piatti on Saturday 20 May.
Street is well known in the hacking community, having graced the stages of some of the largest information security summits in the world. He is in South Africa as one of the speakers at the highly acclaimed IT Web Security Summit 2017 which was held in Midrand last week.
"One thing about this area that the residents must not lose sight of, is the visitors that come to the Garden Route. There are a lot of people with a lot of money who have done business in the area and they are high-value targets," he said.
"Residents may think this is a low-key area, but online you are not local or geographical; you are just a number on the internet - and there are people from all over the world trying to scan and compromise your computer. One of the worst things besides no security is a false sense of security."
Street urged people to stop using passwords and start using passphrases. "The space bar can be used as a valid character; set your passphrase by using apostrophes, spaces and changing one of the letters into a number like an 'I' into a one. This will make your passphrase much more secure."
He added, "The main thing one can do to prevent you from being a victim of cyber crime is simply to allow your system to patch all the applications you are running (i.e. to allow the system updates that one receives). This will greatly improve security and it is free."
- Use passphrases, not passwords.
- Patching is vital and most important.
- Every firewall rule should tie back to a process and rules rarely turn out well - monitor the log-ins.
- Wi-Fi needs to be segmented and considered an untrusted communication channel.
Training your employees and family members will be your biggest return on investment when it comes to information security.
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