To be safe, you have to protect yourself

Do you believe that it was really a student who hacked masses of data from celebrities and politicians and presented them to the public as a Twitter Advent calendar? During interrogation, the accused was not even able to circumvent two-factor authentication, which to the knowledge of the authorities was part of the attack. It is more likely that several hackers were involved in the attack, and the final truth is likely to remain in the dark. It is simply extremely difficult to catch the real perpetrators, and prevention of such attacks is almost impossible by the state and the authorities. Those who want to be safe must protect themselves. But what protection is the right one?

The secure password

First of all, there are the passwords - time and again, people are warned against using too simple passwords or being careless with them. There has been a BSI guideline on this for years, which you can easily find on the Internet. Nevertheless, you have to read with astonishment that 123456 is still the most used password - how can that be? The problem probably results exactly from the recommendations of the BSI, because a password should be complex and contain different character forms. But this makes it difficult to learn them by heart, especially since you need many different ones nowadays. So you have to write them down somewhere, which is where the next problem starts.

The secure password manager

How do I make sure that passwords are available when you need them, but cannot be stolen by third parties? Modern password managers can help here. They work like a safe on the computer or in the cloud. All you have to do is remember a password with which you can open the safe. All other passwords are securely encrypted in the password manager.

The secure encryption

The second security measure that is repeatedly mentioned is encryption. It does not prevent hackers from stealing data, but it does make it unusable for the data thief. The effort to crack modern encryption codes is far too high for the 08/15 hacker. Nevertheless, encryption is used far too rarely - this applies to both private and business areas. But why? Here, human convenience probably plays a major role. The most widespread encryption method is container encryption. It makes it necessary to define and create a container and generate a password for it. All data in the container is encrypted. If they are needed again, the container must be opened each time using the password. This means that additional cumbersome steps are necessary every time you want to encrypt or decrypt data. And additional passwords are also added to the collection again.

But if it is advisable to encrypt everything anyway, why do you need the container? Why not encrypt all data during the normal saving process? File-based encryption solutions or even "on-the-fly encryption" do exactly that without any additional steps. You identify yourself once and the data is always accessible. If you also use two-factor authentication, you will be really secure in the future. Due to their simple handling, they are recommended for both private and business IT users. For data used for business purposes, there is also the fact that the EU-DSGVO prescribes the encryption of personal data - so this problem would also be solved immediately.

The secure, managed computer

A third important principle is added in the business area. It is the requirement that only a managed computer is a secure computer. All business IT devices must be included in the company's network and security management. Companies and organizations are most secure when they deploy a solution that provides management and security of all endpoints from a single source.