Bottom Line: One of the best New Year’s resolutions anyone can make is to learn new ways to secure their personal and professional lives online, starting with ten proven ways they can take greater control over their own cyber security.

For many professionals, their personal and professional lives have blended together thanks to the growing number of connected, IoT-capable devices including cars, home security systems, smartphones, virtual assistants including Amazon Echo, Google Home, WiFi routers and more. It’s typical to find homes with two dozen or more connected devices that are relied for everything going on in a person’s life from personal interests, connecting with friends and getting work done.

It’s Time to Secure Every Area of Your Smart, Connected World

Faced with chronic time shortages, many people rely on smart, connected devices supported by AI and machine learning to get more done in less time. They’re proliferating today because they’ve proven to be very effective at personalizing experiences while providing the added convenience of being always on and available to help. Smart, connected devices are an extension of a person’s identity today as they contain insights into buying behavior and in some cases, actual conversations. The more these devices are protected, the more a person’s identity and most valuable resource of all – time – is protected too.

Strengthening your own cybersecurity starts by seeing every device and the apps you use as potential attack surfaces that need to be protected. Just as you wouldn’t likely leave any of the physical doors to your home unprotected and locked, you need to secure all the digital entrances to your home and person. Like the CEO and cybersecurity team of any organization who is focusing on how to reduce the risk of a breach, the same level of intensity and vigilance to personal cybersecurity needs to become the new normal.

10 Ways You Can Own Your Cybersecurity

The following are the top ten ways you can take control and own your own security. Several of the ways mentioned below are from the recent Centrify webinar, Cybersecurity Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond:

• Replace weak passwords used on multiple accounts with a unique, longer password for each online account. Start by getting away from having the same password for multiple accounts. When a single account gets hacked it can easily lead to all the others with the same password and comparable user ID. Passwords are the proving to be the weakest attack vector there is for personal information today. World Password Day serves as a reminder every May to use stronger, different passwords on each account.
• Start researching and choose a Password Manager that is flexible enough to match how you like to work. It’s time to get beyond Post-It notes and paper-based approaches to managing your own passwords now. Dashlane, LastPass and OneLogin are all excellent password managers worth checking out. If you’re not sure password managers are worth it, I’ve seen them add an additional layer of security to personal and work accounts that would not have otherwise been available. Some will even notify you when an account you have might have been breached, and recommend a new password for you. A screen capture from the webinar illustrates the differences between personal, professional and Privileged Access Management (PAM) levels of password security:

Centrify webinar, Cybersecurity Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond:

• Use single-sign-on (SSO) if available for systems at work, even if you’re logging in at the office. SSO systems use temporary tokens which have proven to be more reliable than static credentials. One of the primary design goals of SSO is to authenticate your identity once, and give you access to the applications and system resources you need and are entitled to access to get work done.
• Vault away passwords to critical systems and data. In the privileged access world of Cybersecurity operations in any organization, password vaults have become commonplace. Password vaults are similar to password managers many people use for their personal devices, web applications and sites they regularly visit. In the case of a password vault, privileged credentials are checked in and out by admins, with each password automatically rotating to ensure greater randomization.
• Enable security on all the devices you received over the holidays, starting with your WiFi router. If you’ve never set an admin password on your WiFi router and the two guest access points they typically have, now is a great time to do that. If you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home, manually disable the microphones. On the Echo, press the microphone button until the external ring turns red. On Google Home, use the small switch on the side to turn off the microphone..On an Amazon Alexa, it’s possible to review voice recordings associated with your account and delete the voice recordings one by one, by date range, by Alexa-enabled device, or all at once by visiting Settings > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app or https://www.amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings. It’s a good idea to use PIN protection to disable voice purchases too. If you have Baby Monitors in your home, connect to them using a secured WiFi connection, not Bluetooth. Have everything behind your home firewall so there’s a minimal number of threat surfaces in your home. 
• Take few of the many LinkedIn learning courses on practical cybersecurity to stay current on the latest techniques. LinkedIn Learning has 19 courses available today that are focused on practical cybersecurity step you can take to protect your company’s systems and your own. You can find all 19 courses here. LinkedIn Learning has 462 learning resources available today, available here. I’ve taken a few over a lunch break and have found them informative, interesting and useful.
•  Realize that you may be getting phishing and spear-phishing e-mails every week. Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of browser plug-ins to pop up messages asking for your login and password information for sites. Combining the latest information from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other sites, hackers often target new employees and with spearfishing campaigns where they impersonate a CEO and other senior-level executives. Spearfishing attempts can be easily thwarted by calling the supposed sender to ask if the request is legitimate. A second way to spot phishing and spear-fishing attempts is they will ask you for one or more of the pieces of information needed for completing a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) login to an account. Misspelled words, questionable e-mail addresses and unsecured domains and websites are also a sure tip-off of a phishing attempt.
• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) greatly expands the enterprise attack surface. Define the success of a BYOD security strategy by how well it immediately shuts down access to confidential data and systems first. Being able to immediately block access to confidential systems and data is the most important aspect of securing any BYOD across a network. It’s common for BYOD enablement strategies to include integrations to Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce and Workday, Slack, Salesforce and others.
• Always use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) everywhere it’s offered. MFA is based on three or more factors that can authenticate who you are. Something you know (passwords, PINs, code works), something you have (a smartphone, tokens devices that produce pins or pre-defined pins) or something you are (biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris and face scans). Google, for example, provides MFA as part of their account management to every account holder, in addition to a thorough security check-up which is useful for seeing how many times a given password has been reused.

Centrify webinar, Cybersecurity Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond:

• Determine where you and your company are from a privileged access maturity standpoint. Centrify shared the four stages of privileged access security on the webinar, and each phase is a useful benchmark for anyone or organization looking to improve their cybersecurity effectiveness. Centrify found in a recent survey that 42% of organizations are at the nonexistent phase of the model. As an organization progresses up the model, there’s greater accountability and visibility for each aspect of a cybersecurity strategy. For individuals the progression is much the same, all leading to lower risk of a breach and stolen privileged access credentials occurring.  

Centrify webinar, Cybersecurity Best Practices: The Basics and Beyond:

Conclusion

While not every user in an organization is going to have privileged entitlements, it is up to every individual to take ownership of their cybersecurity hygiene to ensure they don’t become the most-easily-exploited employee in the company. That’s what the bad guys are looking for: the easiest way in. Why try to hack in against sophisticated technology when they can just guess your easy password, or get you to hand it over to them by phishing? Be cyber smart in 2020 – these ten tips might save you from being the weakest link that could cost your organization millions.

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You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

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