National Cybersecurity Awareness Month – Week Four

Protect IT: Maintain your Digital Profile

Week Four and the final week of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is Protect IT: Maintain your Digital Profile. By researching and assessing your digital profile and then following good security practices you will be taking the necessary steps to protect yourself and your family.

Researching and Assessing your Digital Profile

The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure have written an excellent guide on tracking your digital footprint, it’s a guide to digital footprint discovery and management: https://www.cpni.gov.uk/system/files/documents/59/06/10_Tracking%20my%20digital%20footprint_FINAL.pdf

I recommend you read the guide that I’ve linked to above, but here is a quick summary of what they suggest you should do:

• Decide what your stance is on information being published about you or your family online
• Find out what information about you or your family is available to the public
• Enter the minimum amount of real information into online registration forms
• Remove metadata from pictures before you post them online
• Protect your phone number – payments can be charged to your mobile phone bill
• Think before you click – even a seemingly innocuous post can be used against you
• Check privacy settings regularly and change them from their default settings
• Keep passwords safe
• Compartmentalise your (digital) life – use different email addresses for different activities
• Do not give social media apps access to your phone or email address
• If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is
• Hand over personal information wisely
• Make a plan for what to do if you lose your device
• Don’t make your device easy for others to access

They have also included a really good website checklist, giving you details of which websites to check for your information and what to search for. I highly recommend you read the full guide.

Cyber Hygiene

It’s an odd choice of words really, it’s an attempt to compare cyber hygiene with personal hygiene, something that we do to keep healthy. So, the idea is if you following cyber hygiene you can keep your digital-self healthy.

A lot of cyber hygiene talks about steps you can take to secure an organisation, as I’m trying to keep these articles aimed at what we can do to help ourselves in a personal capacity I’ll list those that are relevant in our home lives:

• Know what devices you have and what is being used in your family
• Ensure those devices are configured securely
• Maintain the devices with security patches (operating systems and software)
• Use anti-virus software, consider turning on email and web browser protection
• Use a firewall
• Be careful opening unsolicited emails and browsing dodgy looking websites
• Have a plan for backing up your data – particularly photos, you can never get those memories back if you lose them!
• Use strong passwords and make sure they are managed securely
• Make sure that everyone in your family knows what to look out for and how to protect themselves.

Week Four Quiz Question

What organisation has written a guide on tracking your digital footprint?

Please send answers to isg@ucl.ac.ukwith the subject line of “NCAM – Week Four”.

The winner for week four will be contacted on Friday.

This is the end of the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month for this year, please come back again in October next year for more information and prizes to be won. In the meantime, subscribe to our blog so that you are automatically informed whenever we post a new blog article.

As always, if you have any queries or concerns regarding information security at UCL, please contact us at isg@ucl.ac.uk.