Playing safe on the web
By Nikke Ho Yen Mae
By now, you would have been either choke-fed news about celebrity nudes and the privacy issues surrounding it or living under a rock if you just went, “Nudes? What nudes?” Reactions are varied, ranging from apathy towards the victims to genuine concern for the security of devices and online services. One way or another, what you should take away from the Watergate scandal of our time — aptly named Celebgate — is that information is never ever really safe on the Internet.
So how do you keep yourself and your information safe? Well, apart from barring l33t hax0rs (that’s elite hackers for you amateurs) and the NSA, the simplest way to prevent a privacy breach is to just not have it on the cloud. It seems like an obvious thing, but sometimes you may not be aware of the back-up settings on your device that may automatically upload your data to a remote server. Even if you actively choose to enable it, you cannot be sure if the privacy settings are set to public or private unless specified.
It all boils down to this: you are your own best security system, as flawed as you may be as a fragile organic being with the processing capabilities of a rudimentary calculator. There is no end all be all solution that is 100% foolproof. If there was, the world would have caught on to it by now and the internet would be a much safer place. Until then, it is generally a good rule of thumb to practice the basic security steps websites repeat over and over again, such as having strong, unique passwords for important accounts like Paypal or your email client.
Naturally, it is a bit of a challenge to remember complicated passwords. Password managers are pretty feasible granted that you are the only person who has access to your device and that the device does not get stolen or lost. You can also go one step further by encrypting sensitive data on your own via apps or even host your own server, but who are we kidding. If you have the means to do those things, you would have already done it in the first place!
It is alright if you are not familiar with encryption or how to host a server outside of Left 4 Dead 2. At the end of the day, as long as you do not post information indiscriminately and are mindful of system loopholes and settings, you should be relatively safe. It also helps to have a bit of common sense. For the love of all that is holy, do not click on any attachments or outgoing links in emails from unknown senders. Duh, simple things that people should know, right? And yet phishing scams still occur.
Again, it cannot be stressed enough that basic preventative measures do help; they exist for a reason and you should adhere to them if you want some measure of security. Security breaches cannot be foreseen, so they become technical issues within the system when they do occur. The best thing for you to do is to keep an eye on as many points of exploitation as possible by reading up on security measures and weighing the risks. And be ever watchful; even the smallest stone can trip you up.