Kids & Guests
It is a good practice to separate your home work environment if possible. Make sure family and guests understand they cannot use your work devices. Unlike in an office environment, the possibility of kids, guests or other family members using your work devices are greater. They can accidentally erase or modify information, or, perhaps even worse, get a device infected.
Updates
Keep your devices software programs and applications up to date (running the latest version of its software) Cyber attackers are constantly looking for new vulnerabilities in the software your devices use. When they discover vulnerabilities, they use special programs to exploit them and hack into the devices you are using. Meanwhile, the companies that created the software for these devices are hard at work fixing them by releasing updates. By ensuring your computers and mobile devices install these updates promptly, you make it much harder for someone to hack you. To stay current, simply enable automatic updating whenever possible. This rule applies to almost any technology connected to a network, including not only your work devices but Internet-connected TV’s, baby monitors, security cameras, home routers, IoT devices, gaming consoles or even your car.
Passwords
Make sure to use strong passwords. Passphrase is one of the simplest ways to create a strong password. A Passphrase is a password composed of a sentence or combination of words. An example of a passphrase could be four random words, such as, “wincingwashroom processkitty” wincing, washroom, process, kitty). Passphrases generally tend to be longer and more difficult to crack than the average password, which increases overall security. Sites such as useapassphrase.com can help to generate a completely random passphrase.
Use unique passphrases for each device or online account. This way if one credential is compromised, the attacker wouldn’t have access to other devices or accounts.
Use biometrics when available. Many modern devices have the capability of access using fingerprints, facial recognition, retinal scanning, etc.
Keeping kids safe online
Kids online Safety
Years ago while I was monitoring my home network, I discovered that my 11 years old step-daughter was in a chat with a guy having adult conversations and with sexual content involved. I was shocked and angry at the same time. Due to this and other events, I started to investigate what I could do to protect my kids from online predators. Besides reporting this incident to the authorities, I started to look for information online about network security, router logs, network traffic, I created a separated network for my kids with restrictions, such us, internet available time, website restrictions, IP restrictions using OpenDNS and more. That’s where my passion for cybersecurity started, I wanted to learn “everything” to protect my family and to keep my kids safe online.
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