Feb. 15, 2017
Josephine Wolff co-authored a blog post on EdX on how to protect yourself and your data:
Cybersecurity has rapidly become a key concern in every industry and every organization across the globe. The incredible connectivity and technological innovations that we enjoy today in our personal and professional lives, that have made possible new, more efficient forms of commerce, communication, and entertainment, have also brought a host of emerging threats and risks, the scope of which we have only just begun to grasp.
A recent Distributed Deny of Service (DDoS) attack to Dyn, a domain name service provider, caused a massive east coast Internet outage. The culprit was millions of Internet connected (IoT) devices that formed a botnet and conducted a coordinated attack to the target.
Many advanced persistent threat attacks are initiated with phishing emails with attachments or embedded URL links to explore weaknesses in human users. The breach of the DNC email account last year was caused by a malicious email. Many organizations have suffered financial losses from ransomware that are often delivered via emails. It is often said that the weakest link in cybersecurity is the human user, and for a long time to come, human users will be the prime target for attackers to establish a foothold inside networks and infrastructures