unit 5 assignment

Throughout the years, cybersecurity has rapidly grown. Whether we like it or not it has grown in both ways, positive and negative. As new innovation and technology develops so does the malicious risks and threats. Choosing the career path of a cyber specialist is not easy because they have a lot at hand to maintain. As those risks and threats grow you must make sure you are also studying and learning the new ways of securing an environment. One of the advancements I will talk about in my paper will be social media. The way things are headed in our time, it seems to me that social media is the new trend. This opens up a world of hurt, if users are not aware of what is happening in the cyber world. A big topic right now is privacy. Privacy due to social media isn’t really private, unless if you know what you are doing, such as adjusting your settings, limiting who can search for you etc. In an article I read Robert Siciliano stated “Social media is less than six years old. Something as harmless as a picture of a baby in a tub could be traded online by pedophiles.” (Siciliano, 2011). With the trend of having social media such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, individuals are not doing their due diligence on securing their information. A large group of individuals are exposing their own personal information online due to the lack of self-awareness. For example, on Facebook you can put a lot of information that can be used against you such as, Date of Birth, place of birth, jobs, and a few others. All of that information can be used to reset passwords or even open cards on your behalf. Ultimately, a lot of people’s information gets compromised daily due to the information they are putting out there on the web, and lack of cyber awareness. A big advancement in today’s digital age I would say is the effort websites are putting towards cyber security. Social media such as Instagram, and Facebook, now offer multifactor authentication. Amazon also offers multifactor authentication such as “one-time-password (OTP)”. This will force the user to login using the regular username and password but will also send a code to you via text, or you can call the number they have, in order to get that OTP. (Maduforo, 2019). It may not seem like a big advancement from a big picture overview, but I personally think it is because these companies are taking the initiative to make sure they are doing their part in assisting the user and guiding them the right path. Whether we like it or not technology will continue to grow, but as stated previously it will come with the negative aspects as well. Us as users must take the time to learn about the growing threats in our cyber world. This will ultimately benefit us as individuals because it is our responsibility to make sure we are doing what we can to protect our valuable information. For example, it might be as simple as making sure we use harder passwords that includes, an uppercase letter, lower case letter, special character, and even number. By incorporating simple things like that, this will help us in the near future.

References

Maduforo, J. (2019, March 07). 4 Steps for Protecting Your Social Media Accounts from Hack. Retrieved June 17, 2020, from https://medium.com/inside-futuresoft/4-steps-for-protecting-your-social-mediaaccounts-from-hack-16802037961

Siciliano, R. (2011, May 25). Social Media Privacy and Personal Security Issues. Retrieved from Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-siciliano/social-media-privacyand_b_245857.htm