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TCNJ Magazine - Spring 2019

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27 SPRING 2019 Tina Hay is editor-at-large for the Penn Stater magazine and a freelance writer and editor. 1. Use stronger passwords. "I tell people to think about a sentence — one that's not easy to guess — then substitute numbers or symbols for some of the letters." 2. Encrypt. "Encryption renders data unreadable by anyone who lacks a decryption key for it. iPhones encrypt data when they're locked. WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage encrypt messages by default. With others, like Facebook Messenger, you can manually enable encryption." 3. Avoid public WiFi. "I once did a speech with a former Israeli cyberintelligence officer at the Yale Club in New York City. We set up our own WiFi hotspot. And of the 60 people in the room, 17 connected to the spoofed WiFi, which would have given us the ability to hack every one of their devices." 4. Be wary about smart speakers. "I received an Alexa as a gift — and it remains in its box. I view Alexa as a witness. Security and privacy weigh much heavier than convenience." 5. Think before you enable location services. "All of that's being tracked. So don't enable unless you really need to." 6. Use multi-factor authentication. "Virtually every hack I deal with in organizations is caused by a lack of multi-factor authentication." 7. Know what your kids are doing online. "There's a huge identity theft and fraud component to gaming. Think of the Fortnite breach in January — credit card numbers and financial account numbers may have been stolen from millions of kids or their parents." 8. Check your kids' credit reports. "It's not uncommon for a fraudster to steal a child's Social Security number, then use that to get credit cards, open bank accounts, pay their cable bill, take out loans. Actions like these generate a credit report. Most children don't have a credit report. If there is one, there's a very good chance your child's identity has been stolen." Be careful out there "We live our lives online," Ed McAndrew says. Here, he offers eight tips for staying safe. the world today. You know who some of these companies' biggest customers are when it comes to this stuff ? Political organizations. The Obama campaign was the first to really exploit this type of data mining. Everybody does it now — legally, in the United States, and illegally, where foreign powers and foreign agents attempt to influence our elections. And nation-state hackers — foreign governments — can gather information on U.S. citizens and create individual dossiers on each person. Why would they need that? For potential extortion, for recruitment of spies, for exploitation as they see fit. stealing, to disrupting daily life and destroying things. You mentioned that technology tends to expand faster than our ability to address the security and privacy concerns. Is it possible to be optimistic in light of that? I think it is. Because there's a growing realization that privacy and security have to be part of the design and innovation process. You have to bake them into the development of new products and services. One of the key questions is: How much government intervention are we going to see in privacy and security? The government cannot wholly address this threat, which is why my mission continues: finding ways to better secure our future. I suspect the rest of my career will be dedicated to that. ■ Can you peek around the corner and tell us what we're going to be worrying about a year from now? Two years from now? The development of the 5G network — whoever controls the switches and the routers will control all of the information. So when they take cyberwar to the next level, 5G is our greatest innovation — and our greatest threat. We're going to see more foreign involvement directed at shaping governments and policies around the world. I see an increasing public safety threat where we move beyond just spying and

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