If You Connect It, Protect It

The line between our online and offline lives is becoming harder to distinguish—so much so that Gartner forecasts that 25 billion connected things will be in use by 2021. With all of these connections, we are presented with not only global opportunities, but also a variety of challenges to protect the devices and the data residing on those devices. We all play a role in this protection.

Protecting Connected Devices

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  Enable Multi-Factor Authentication for your university and personal accounts. This feature adds an extra layer of security to help thwart attackers from stealing your data. If an attacker compromises your account, they must have another form of validation to be granted access. You may already be familiar with this if you do online banking.
• Learn how to spot a phishing email. Attackers are constantly sending fake email messages to our email addresses in attempts to steal sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers. Spotting these phishing attempts is critical.
• Secure your password. The more devices and accounts that we create, the more passwords we must keep track of. But did you know that password reuse is a dangerous practice? If an attacker gains access to one of your accounts, they can pivot to many other services if you use the same password. A good alternative to this would be to utilize a password manager to help securely generate and remember passwords for you