A consumers approach to Cyber Security

Are you protected?

In 2017 alone, the world lost an estimated 600 billion dollars to cybercrime. Since then, this number has been on a path of consistent growth and companies have started to take this threat much more seriously. From an SMB to an Enterprise level business, the conversation on cyber security now a much more significant role in the day to day operations of these entities. However, the conversation of cyber security doesn’t seem to carry the same weight at the consumer level. Most consumers are aware of possible cyber threats, but most consumers probably don’t follow industry best practices, to protect themselves against the plethora of atatcks out in the cyber world. In this day and age having antivirus or a firewall definitely is not enough to protect yourself and your information from being compromised in anyway. I firmly believe that the tech community needs to do a better job when it comes to educating the rest of the public on these issues. It's not the most important aspect of cyber security but the “Layered Approach” is one of the most fundamental. While I’m not an expert (yet) , listed a few things below that you should keep in consideration when you want to secure your personal environments. Just keep in mind how well you’re protected can be thought of as the number of barriers you have placed between your environment and a potential attacker.

Antivirus:  Debatably the most fundamental piece of the layered approach it will most likely be the difference maker on your machine being compromised.  Integrating AV plugins into your web browser is also extremely recommended.

Notable Mentions:  Webroot | Bitdefender | ESET

BackUp Provider: We recommend making your backup solutions hybrid having physical copies (HD, SSD etc.) as well as a cloud backup provider. Taking a page from Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery best practices, its is important to be able to continue operating even after you data loss or a ransomware attack.

Notable Mentions: Google Drive | One Drive | Amazon Drive

VPN:  Another extremely important layer is the Virtual Private Network. A VPN will encrypt your data transmissions and make you less vulnerable to networking related attacks. If you tend to use free wifi at restaurants or hotels, you are making yourself very vulnerable  to Packet Snooping / Sniffing , Man In the Middle Attacks  and some of those networks will often be unencrypted. You are basically asking to be hacked if you utilize this service without a vpn

Notable Mentions: IpVanish |NordVPN |Cyber Ghost

MFA: One of the most convenient things about our access to Smartphones is Multi-Factor Authentication. If you own any account that allows this, we recommend setting up the feature. It can be a big difference maker from hacker gaining access to your Gmail, iCloud or any account that’s you have tied to the internet.

AD Blocker Premium: For any and everyone who attempts to stream on the internet, it’s almost imperative to have the adblock plus addon.  To make it simple, attempting to stream without AdBlock Premium hooking up on tinder with no condom.