The Need to be Cyber-Smart

By: Jonathon Chiu, The Freedom Forum   
Why you should consider learning about cybersecurity.
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   You’re going about your day and surfing the internet on your phone. Suddenly, you get an email from your bank saying that someone has made a transaction of $2,500 and they require your credit card information to resolve the issue.
   There is a link attached to the email. You click the link in a panic and are taken to your bank’s webpage. You fill out the information and hit submit, feeling relieved that the crisis has been averted, only to find out later that your bank account has been emptied and that the webpage you thought was valid was actually a fake.
   This is a phishing scam - when a bad actor sends an email to an unsuspecting victim - and it is one of the most common cyberattacks seen today as more and more people begin to use the internet for the majority of their everyday activities. 
   “A fair amount of research and analysis shows a tremendous growth in Internet usage since 2000,” said Marie Bachman, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Bethlehem Area School District, “When you consider online shopping, online banking, online meetings, remote work, telehealth visits, and social media… at least 80% of a person's daily life may depend on the Internet.”
   This increase in internet usage has also come with an increase in cyberattacks, with Norton reporting that up to 2,200 people experience a cyberattack every day. 
   While these attacks may be levied against anyone regardless of age, an article by Vox reports that younger generations are experiencing more cyberattacks, from phishing to identity theft, than their older counterparts.
   These cyberattacks have caused devastating damage to the networks of high-profile institutions, with the BASD requiring a district-wide password change from student ID numbers only a few years ago following a cyberattack that saw the breach of several student accounts.
   The rise in cyberattacks has caused many to become interested in learning cybersecurity, with a survey given out to select students throughout Freedom showing that over 60 percent of those who answered expressed interest in learning about cybersecurity.
   “Kids are aware that there are hackers out there or people that… [want to] mess with them [online],” says Mr. Blozinsky, a cybersecurity teacher at Freedom High School.
   With all the dangers that lurk on the internet, it is important to consider what is safe to disclose to others through means such as social media, with responses to the survey mentioned earlier showing a general consensus that sensitive data -  bank details, address, or even birthdates - would be compromising to one’s digital security should they be posted online.
   It is also important that other security measures be taken to better protect yourself online, with some basic tips being to create a password that is hard to figure out as well as using different ones for each account you have. 
   There are also a number of additional protections available to the public to better their cybersecurity, from free antivirus software that counters cyberattacks to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that encrypt your online signature. However, it still remains important that you are aware of the dangers of the internet regardless of the level of protection you have.
   “Its certainly good… to take the basic steps [to protect yourself online],” Said Brian Stokes, a professor of data security at Northampton Community College (NCC), “should you have antivirus? Yeah. Should you use a VPN? absolutely! Will there still be problems? Yes, but I don’t think we’ll ever go back [to not using the internet].” 
   A quotation from the movie “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” That seems relevant here, “The 21st century is a digital book”. While these words may stem from a work of fiction, their meaning remains evermore true through how our digital footprint, like a physical book, can easily be read by others, whether we want them to or not, if we are not careful. 
   Should we allow our personal data, and thus our lives, be stolen by those that mean us harm or will we instead make it our mission to learn all we can on how to better protect our digital footprint and thus ourselves? Should we learn to become Cyber-Smart?