Introverted Leadership Mentor
I had the pleasure of presenting the following presentation to the Rochester Regional Library Council on Oct. 25th. It contains general Internet and computer safety tips and is slightly modified from a session we provide to faculty and staff at RIT.
Having trouble with security awareness at your university or college? Need some new ideas? Trying to figure out what to do for National Cyber Security Awareness Month?
The members of the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC) Awareness and Training Working Group have created some wiki-based resources to help you with your security awareness initiatives.
We’ve created two main resources.
Check out these resources. The A&T Working Group is delighted to share their ideas with you and they’re there to help you be successful. They have a wide range of expertise and they believe you’ll find these materials valuable.
Today, I had the privilege of being interviewed by our local YNN cable news about the challenges presented by placing private information on portable devices. A surgeon at the University of Rochester Medical Center had lost a flash drive containing the medical details of around 800 of his patients. The reporter, Anne Lithiluxa, asked me how loss of data could be prevented.
Generally, if you’re going to place private information on a portable device, either the device or the information needs to be encrypted The likelihood of exposure of private information through the loss of portable devices has increased tremendously lately due to the proliferation of smartphones and their use in accessing corporate email accounts. Good information security practice is always a combination of safe handling practices and technical protections.
However, the bottom line is that people are always the weakest link. Technical protections can always be defeated by poor practices.
Each fall, the RIT Information Security Office provides a Digital Self Defense orientation to first year students. The session helps the students understand the information security threats they will face. We also communicate their responsibility for keeping themselves and others safe online. As you might imagine, keeping the attention of these students midway through their orientation week can be challenging. To help hold their interest, we use a number of security awareness videos in our presentation.
The list of videos below includes an amateur and professional videos and student-created entries in the EDUCAUSE Annual Security Video contest.
Facebook Stalker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCh9bmg0zGg
The Onion: Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk their College-Aged Kids https://www.theonion.com/video/facebook-twitter-revolutionizing-how-parents-stalk,14364/
Weird “Al” Yankovic Virus Alert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvfD5rnkTws
Identity Theft for Criminals student video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agmHVBJL_fk
Check out the EDUCAUSE Video Contest Page on Facebook for more videos.
If you know of other good security awareness videos, please add a comment!
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the location services (such as Google Latitude) offered by various mobile devices and by social networking sites. For example, is it a good thing to let people know where you are when you’re tweeting?
When we talk to the incoming first year class at RIT each fall, we talk about the potential danger of cyberstalking, illustrating it humorously through the Facebook Stalker YouTube video. We don’t try to over dramatize the danger, but we do want students to be aware of the possibility. (We also discourage placing phone numbers and addresses in Facebook and other social networking profiles.)
We saw some evidence of cyberstalking with our daughter in high school. She would post info about where she would be and one person showed up there consistently.
Are we overreacting to the potential danger? On a risk map, I would rate cyberstalking as a low-probability high-impact risk. Is cyberstalking something you worry about? Do any of you use these “location services” on your mobile devices or Tweet with your location? Why or why not?
Ben
