CyberSecurity, its benefits and How to stay protected from cyberattacks

Greetings to everyone here on this great platform, I am here once again to write and publish another exciting leofinance-related post. Guess what, today I would be tackling cybersecurity and not the usual finance post I used to write. Stay tuned with me as I write to explore this wonderful topic today. Without much ado, let's go straight to the agenda.

So one may ask what is cybersecurity? Yes, what is it all about, okay cybersecurity I would define it as the measures or the ways that are undertaken to get protected against unauthorized and criminal information and data on electronic devices, computers, and networks as well. Cybersecurity is purposely aimed at fighting these hackers and fraudsters that have the intention to steal information and data from others by breaching networks. Most industries do have cybersecurity that aids in protecting hackers or fraudsters from breaching their financial records. Also, cybersecurity does cooperate with government organizations to help protect military communications and others. Cybersecurity also plays an important role in the health sector by preventing the access of patient data by those phishers. Cybersecurity generally is designed to protect electronic assets. Cybersecurity protects online data through the mitigation of vulnerabilities.

There are many benefits of cybersecurity and I would elaborate on some of them in this article. There are so many areas where cyber security is important to us and I would talk about them here as well.

Firstly, cybersecurity has impacted the banking sector by helping in protecting bank accounts from being hacked or breached. In 2014, there was a data breach where hackers had access to over seventy-six million JPMorgan Chase customer's data including their names, phone numbers, addresses, and many more. This was the 2014 JPMorgan Chase data breach and also about 7 million small-scale businesses were also compromised. This breach indicates the benefit of cybersecurity as it would have prevented and protected this breach from happening if it was implemented.

In addition, cybersecurity is also used in protecting students from cyber attacks. Cybersecurity has come to protect students' identity on the internet because students do a lot of stuff online and might possibly enter certain details which can lead to their being hacked. There has been a situation where some students have been hacked and their personal information was used for fraudulent activities. Not only that, even their credit cards were hacked and were used messily in purchasing stuff, and even kept huge debts on the credit cards.

Furthermore, cyber security has helped businesses and organizations for protecting their financial records of those organizations. A real case here was also the target data breach of organizations where fraudsters hacked customers' data. It led to those organizations paying huge amounts of money to their customers for that. Having cybersecurity would have prevented all these from happening and that is why it is very necessary.

Finally, cyber security also serves as an important factor in protecting online information and data, or in general, cybersecurity helps to protect digital assets from attacks and accessibility by hackers and fraudsters. In the case study under this, there was a breach into Equifax's organization where these hackers had access to more than 145 million people's information and this occurred in 2017. Similarly, another breach occurred in the following year, that is 2018, and this time around Marriott where over 5oo million people's personal information was breached. These are really huge numbers of data getting breached so easily like that and with the aid of cybersecurity being kept in place, all these beaches would have been under control.

Breaches occurring in organizations would lead those companies or organizations to lose a lot of customers and sometimes their company or organization gets collapsed because customers are the way forward of every organization, if they aren't there for you then I don't think it would make sense by just producing goods whilst they are no one to purchase those good from you. The points mentioned above are some of the reasons cybersecurity is very important in our lives and should be implemented by organizations, companies, schools, churches, hospitals, and every big institution dealing with the information of a large number of people. Cybersecurity is important in protecting individuals and businesses or organizations from potential breaches in their security to have access to important data and information of individuals or the organization at large.

There are several forms of cyber attacks but let's look at the most common ones here in this article. Let's dive into this topic then;

First of all, we have what we call denial-of-service. This is a form of malware that stops people from having access to a particular service or system and it happens when the system or service is flooded with traffic. It is sometimes done with the intention of damaging the system or service to make it malfunction. Thus, stops the system from functioning properly.

Furthermore, another cyberattack is phishing attacks. This form of cyberattack involves users sharing malicious links and deceiving them to click for rewards or something special. Individuals that aren't aware of these people tend to click and just after clicking those links, they get access to their detailed information. They usually get access to the user's login credentials such as your password and login.

Moreover, another form of attack is ransomware attack and this form of attack can completely wipe away some of the important files or even shut down the system completely does occur by encrypting files that later expect them to be decrypted in a ransom manner.

Also, malware attack attacks computers and other devices with malicious software to steal information from others or even sometimes execute an attack on a system. This form of attack is also dangerous and can cause a lot of harm to the devices being attacked.

Lastly, let's look at SQL Injection which inputs malicious SQL code into web applications and tends to create vulnerabilities in the application. The injection of this SQL code can cause harm such as deleting and or modifying the database of the web application.

So basically, in a nutshell, the following are lists of the benefits of cybersecurity;

• They have greatly impacted business operations positively by aiding in protecting their systems from being attacked.
• Cybersecurity has also helped to maintain trust between employees and customers.
• Cybersecurity has also brought about technological innovations.
• It has helped in securing or keeping safe financial records of organizations or companies.
• Cybersecurity also helps to maintain the functional ability of the organization.
• It has also protected organizations and companies from incurring penalties or fines for the loss of their customer's information.

Although we have this cybersecurity that aids in protecting our data and information from getting attacked, it is necessary for us as individuals to also know some of the ways to safe keep our files personally without solely depending on the function of cybersecurity. Let's look at some of these ways of methods here in this article.

• We should make sure to always create or use strong passwords in keeping our data. It should be at least 8 characters and should be alpha-numerical and at least add a special letter or a symbol to it. In so doing, it guarantees you a strong password.
• The use of a password manager to track and know examples of stronger passwords that are good for protecting files.
• Don't repeat or re-use a password you have used to keep other files, this makes it easier and faster for hackers to have access to your data because if one password is hacked, then boom they can use that to access all your other accounts.
• We should learn and know how to use 2-factor Authentication as this adds extra protection to our files, data, information, or accounts.
• We should also back up our files or data always so that we can have access to them in case we later lost them through a hack or any other means.
• We should always try to keep our security software up to date and if expired we should delete them immediately from our system. Sometimes expired software can cause these malicious acts and attacks back our system.
• Lastly, we should be cautious about phishing links or websites that we click on.

This would bring us to the end of my post today, I hope that as it is now we have learned some of the importance of cybersecurity in our daily lives and how we can also protect ourselves from being attacked by these fraudsters as well. To make this more interactive, I would be glad to read your feedback about my post in the comment section of this post. Let's keep it interactive, let's go.

Thank you all for your time and attention. I am looking forward to seeing you all in my next post.