Wish you and your family a cyber safe year 2015 and How to make yourselves CYBERSAFE. Your "cyber secure" resolution for 2015

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Jan 1, 2015, 10:31:33 AM1/1/15

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We wish you and your family a cyber safe year 2015.

WARNING - Cyber crimes are affecting not only governments, corporate but even common people like you and me. Your critical, secret/confidential and personal data, information, identity, reputation, assets, etc. are at risk. Hackers / Crackers / Cyber-thieves / Cyber-terrorists are ready to hijack and misuse your data, information, identity, reputation, assets, etc. You need to protect yourselves. Only you can protect yourselves by taking some precautions. Following are some of the precautions you need to take in cyber environment. This is not an exhaustive list but some precautions to start-with.

Make following your “cyber secure” resolution for 2015 –

1. Do not install any free software or app(lication), unless you are sure that it has no spyware or trojan or install harmful/unrequired software or will make your computer as a part of botnet. There is no free lunch and/or dinner or even breakfast/tea. Near 100% chances exist for this in any free software or app. Install any free software or app from a trustworthy source, which certify with liability that the software/app is safe and secure and free for any spyware or trojan or malware. Risk – These free software/apps may steal your files, photos, audios, videos, documents, contact list, SMS, emails, contracts and other confidential and personal information to your detriment.

2. Do not click of any hyperlink in any email or SMS or any other place, unless you are sure of authenticity of safe, secure and genuineness. These links may lead you to a phishing sites or malware download sites or malicious sites. Beware of shortened links also.

3. In an email or other utilities, where attachments can come, do not run / open any attachment program or image or pdf or doc file, unless you are sure of authenticity of safe, secure and genuineness. Spyware or trojan or malware may be hidden in these, which will be installed on your computer, as soon as your open/run/click-on-them.

4. Take regular back-up of your data. The periodicity may vary from daily to monthly depending upon criticalness of your data. This exercise will be helpful on a rainy / tsunami day, when your computer or hard-disk crashes / breaks or data gets corrupted due to any reason including and not limited to malware, power, malfunction.

5. Do not use operating system (such as Windows) as admin user. Create your own user with lower (non-admin) privileges for all normal activities. Using with lower privileges will not automatically (and without warning) install / update any program/software/app without your admin permission. So, you have option to decide – whether to allow installation/updation or not.

6. Make sure that all your operating systems (such as windows) and other programs (such as MS office) are licensed and legal. Install only those programs, which you need.

7. Make sure that all the operating systems (such as windows) and other programs (such as MS office/open-office) are updated for security patches up-to-date. On pirated operating systems and other programs direct updates are not easily possible. Without security patches, all programs are vulnerable to hack/attack.

8. Make sure you Anti-virus (it should be called anti-malware) has up-to-date patches and virus definitions.

9. Never (means NEVER) give your ANY user id and/or password and/or PIN and/or Credit/Debit card number and/or any other critical information to ANYONE on phone or email or SMS or apps like whatsapp, even to known persons. All these modes are easily hackable and prone to man-in-the-middle attack. In case, you need to give any/some of these in an emergency, share in pieces and change the changeable shared information after use by the known person. Never/Never/never give these to any unknown person, even if s/he convince you that s/he is responsible and confident OR even convince you that s/he is President/PM of India.

In the above, the computer also include your smart phone, laptop, tablet or any other gadget.

The above is not an exhaustive list. Some more precautions are required but at this moment I do not want to overload you and make these double digit.

If interested in any specific, contact me at rak...@sysman.in.

Regards,
Rakesh Goyal PhD

Perpetual Student of Information Security and some more subjects

PGDM (IIM-B, Gold Medalist), AMIE (IE, Gold Medalist)

CISA, CISM, CFE, CCCI
CEng, CMC, FIMC, FIE, MIEng, MIInst W, MIIIE, FISM, DAT, TYT

(Consultant for IT Security, Energy Management, Strategy and Growth)
Editor, CCCNews;

Managing Director, Sysman Computers Private Limited;
and
Director-General, Centre for Research and Prevention of Computer Crimes,
Sion, Mumbai 400 022
Phone : +91-99672-48000 / 99672-47000
e-mail : sys...@sysman.in & rak...@sysman.in
url : http://www.sysman.in and http://www.cccnews.in

(Sysman has been empanelled as (a) IS Auditors under IT Act-2000 to audit PKI (2001-2015) AND (b) as IS Security Auditor by CERT-In (Govt. of India) (2004-2015) AND Sysman is Associate Consultant to British Standards Institution to implement BS7799 / ISO17799 / ISO 27001 ISMS).

Author of books / Investigative article -

Computer Crimes - Concept, Control and Prevention (Published in 1993).
Bank Computerisation (Published in 1996).
Digital Signature - All you want to know about it, but don't know whom to ask! (Published in 2004).
Demystifying Information Technology Act - 2000 (Published in 2005).
Sankat Mochan Yojana (Published in 2005) - can be downloaded from www.sysman.in.
Publisher of Case Studies in Information Security (Published in 2002).
eBook - SECURING WI-FI NETWORK (10 steps to DIY Security) - can be downloaded from www.sysman.in.
Investigative article - Does 1,000 tonnes of gold exist in Unnao? http://moneylife.in/article/does-1000-tonnes-of-gold-exist-in-unnao/35037.html#postcomment (Published in 2013)
Investigative article - Rs. 48,400 crores (USD 8 billion) Black Money per year generated by Education Industry in India. http://www.sysman.org/CRPCC-education-black-money-corruption-2014-06-27-001c.pdf (Published in 2014).

To know regularly on Computer / IT Security, subscribe CRPCC newsletter at google-group - "control-computer-crimes" or send an email to subs...@sysman.in with a subject line "subscribe CRPCC newsletter". It is published 3 times per week with current subscriber base is over 120,000.

Download old issues of CCCNews Magazine, published fortnightly from www.cccnews.in.

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