Completing this Thing will give you the opportunity to consider digital security which is relevant for both your personal and professional life.

Open Badge Information

Open Badge: SSSC 23 Things Digital – Thing 6: Digital Security

Introduction

Understanding what data is stored, protected, used and shared by various applications and devices, and how this happens, helps people to take active steps to improving digital security.

Instructions

a) Passwords

Passwords are commonly used to authenticate access to a device, data or service. Therefore, any password that you setup must be appropriate and protected against theft or guessing attacks. 

A useful online tool How Secure Is My Password gives you an idea of how long it would take a computer to crack your password.

Here are some ideas to help you boost your password security.

Create strong passwords

The UK Government’s CyberAware campaign recommends that you create a strong, memorable password by using three random words, such as redhousemonkeys. You can also include numbers and symbols if you need to, for example: 3redhousemonkeys27!

Change passwords regularly

Changing your password regularly increases your security as the stolen password will expire. Avoid using the same password with a different number on the end when changing passwords. This is a common thing people do to help them remember passwords which need to be changed frequently but it is not very secure.

Never give out passwords over the phone or by email

No organisation which treats digital security seriously will ever ask you to do this.

Use a password manager

There are many commercial and free password manager applications which can help you organise your passwords and stay secure. PC Mag UK recently published a comparison of some of them.

b) App permissions

Go to Settings on your phone or device to look at what information your apps are using. For example, does your online banking app have access to your location? Does that game you downloaded have access to your contacts? What apps have access to your camera?

You can use the following guides to help you:

Apple iPhone or iPad / Android / Windows

Alternatively, you can use these Apps on MyPermissions.com  to check through the permissions on your devices and social media platforms.

Was there anything that surprised you?

c) Updates

When you update an operating system or application, the settings often return to the default. This means that the preferences you may have set up previously are often overridden.

For example, you may find that the photos on your smartphone are being backed up to a cloud service such as iCloud or Dropbox. It’s well worth regularly reviewing all your settings after installing updates.

d) Social media ‘games’

Have you taken part in any ‘Let’s find out more about each other’ games on Facebook or Twitter? They usually ask users to answer a range of questions about themselves. Most of these seem innocuous but often there are questions that are commonly used as security questions threaded through, such as ‘Name of first pet’ and ‘First car you had’.

Another common technique is encouraging people to share personal information by posting what their “Detective Name” is e.g.  the name of your first pet and your favourite place to go on holiday, such as “Sammy Ibiza”.  Again, posting this type of thing on a public forum is very risky as you are revealing private information about yourself that someone else can then use to reset passwords and gain access to your accounts.

Think about what you’re sharing!

e) Wi-Fi safety

Watch the following video on Wi-Fi safety.

f) Blog

Write a blog post reflecting on what you learned and how you feel you can apply this knowledge to your role in social services. Include information about any other threats to digital security you are aware of and what can be done to combat them.