Personal and Organizational System Security

 

        Cybersecurity is becoming one of the most important jobs the world today. This is due to the growing amounts of computer hacks and viruses being created with malicious intent. These hacks and viruses are being used to steal personal and organizational information and are even used to attack organization’s websites by overloading their servers with large numbers of useless access request called denial of service (DoS) (Vahid, 2019). The increasing threats of cyber-attacks have also increased the importance of improving system security both personally and professionally. Increasing system security will help prevent sensitive information from being stolen and could help prevent (DoS) from happening by removing the amount of computer beings used to send the large amount of access request.

            Phishing is when scammers use email of text messages to mislead users into providing personal and financial information (Federal Trade Commission, 2022). Scammers send emails pretending to be from a popular website like Amazon even including official logos. They mislead the users by advised them that there password has expired or have been locked and the login information is needed to correct the account. After putting in the information, the sites stores the information so that it can be used or sold to other scammers. This stolen information can be used to access users accounts and steal financial information. Two ways that users can protect themselves is using security software on computers and use multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication will make it harder for scammers to access information even with login credentials and security software will help block suspicious emails from even reaching the users (Federal Trade Commission, 2022).

            Password cracking is when scammers use programs to identify an unknown or forgotten password to a computer or network resource (Gillis, 2021). With password cracking, a hacker can obtain users passwords which can be used to steal money and perform identity theft. This type of scamming can be very damaging. After gathering an encrypted password from computer system, the scammers can decrypt the password and use that same decryption algorithm to decrypt other information being sent to and from that system. One recommendation to combat this form of cyber-attack would be to create a strong password. The stronger the password, the harder it would be to decipher the password (Gillis, 2021). Another defense would be to change passwords frequently and use different passwords on different sites (Vahid, 2019). This will insure that even if one password was recovered, it would not affect other websites that the user is using.

 

 

References

Federal Trade Commission. (2022). How to Recognize and avoid phishing scams. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-recognize-and-avoid-phishing-scams

Gillis, A. (2021, May). What is password cracking? Tecktarget. https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/password-cracker

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.