On October 8, I attended the Cyber Security Awareness Day hosted at Texas State. The event had sponsors that included itac, RBFCU, HP, IBM, T-Mobile, and many others pitching their products along with stressing cyber security. While I was there I listened to Elizabeth Rogers talk about Privacy and Social Media.Elizabeth Rogers is the chief privacy officer at Texas State Comptroller. Mrs. Rogers talked about how there is a sense of privacy on sites like Facebook, with the ability to have only your friends see your information. However, in recent years Facebook has broken these privacy rules themselves and allowed anyone to see your status updates or pictures you post willing to the service. There are more social networks that want you to share your status updates publicly, and so they can target and display ads relating to what you like. Mrs. Rogers also talked about Do Not Track on websites so advertisers cannot see what your doing, or having others see your browsing history through cookies. I feel that cyber security is important because everything we are doing is being moved onto the internet from banking to our countries most confidential information. We need to ensure our information is safe through teaching others to have secure passwords, not sharing sensitive information on the web, along being aware of what sites we willing to give our information to.
There are thousands of social networks from the Playstation network to Snapchat. We assume our data is safe and secure with these services, however they are vulnerable to hacks. We think that after that Snapchat picture is gone, its gone forever, but in fact that image can still be recovered by hackers if they put a little time into it. The Playstation Network hack let our information go to hackers, and we found out that Sony had stored our information in plain text instead of encrypting it. The CSAD, for short, is here to teach others to take responsibility for what we do online. Everything we post online is there to stay for as long as the internet is around, and most people don’t realize this.
October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) is to here to raise awareness on cyber security and crimes being committed over the internet. What are you doing to help the internet become a safer and more secure place?