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A Traveler's Guide to Staying Cybersafe and Practicing Proper Cyber HygieneBy Jonas Walker, Security Strategist at FortiGuard Labs | ||
Dubai, United Arab Emirates As COVID-19 infection rates shift and countries reopen their borders for tourism, travel in some places has returned at an even higher rate than pre-pandemic. With expanding travel comes expanding cyber risks, it is as important as ever for those heading abroad this summer to practice cyber hygiene.
Jonas Walker, Security Strategist at FortiGuard Labs
Why is practicing cyber hygiene essential for travelers? Cyber hygiene is like personal hygiene, it's all about having a daily routine. That includes good practices to ensure that your environment stays clean, especially when traveling.
How have cybercriminals taken advantage of the recent increase in travel? Threat actors are ahead of the curve; they always have been. The better they are prepared, the more likely they will be successful.
What can travelers do to protect themselves against cyber-attacks? I think the most important point is to patch your systems. This is something which should be something of high priority whether you're traveling or not. A good example is when you open the App Store or Google Play Store and update the apps on your smartphone. Next time you do this, check out the release notes, and why the vendor is recommending you update their app. More often than not, it's not about a feature or a new UI. In most cases, it's about security features, it's about a bug that has been fixed. If you don't update these apps, threat actors who are aware of these issues as disclosed by the vendor can take advantage of these vulnerabilities. It’s not that difficult for an attacker to scan systems that haven't been patched and compare if the systems are on different software levels If they are, they know whether something is vulnerable or not. So, updating the system is really important.
How can employees continue to work from anywhere while traveling and connecting to their essential networks? If possible, don't connect to public Wi-Fi, especially if a lot of people are around the network. If you can connect to a public Wi-Fi, pretty much anyone in that area can as well, and you are not in control of what is happening on this network. You don't know who is on this network or what they are doing, because you don't control the security. If the network has bad security, then you now enable your system to be scanned directly by other people on this network.
Social media becomes popular during travel. What should employees avoid when using social media to stay cyber safe? One thing I try to avoid is using social media accounts to log in to certain kinds of platforms. For example, if you connect to Wi-Fi, sometimes you are asked to create an account or log in with one of your social media accounts. If you log in with one of your social media accounts, typically you allow the people running the platform to get access to a lot of sensitive information. My recommendation to avoid this is to create a throwaway account for traveling. This account can be used for the specific purpose of connecting to Wi-Fi without any sensitive information being involved.
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