Subscribe to our daily newsletter
4 no-brainer online security measures we need to start practicing now
We're blissfully ignorant of how we put ourselves at risk online.
Photo credit: Clint Patterson on Unsplash
- According to the 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime Report, businesses fall for ransomware attacks every 14 seconds.
- Many people ignore standard security practices that significantly reduce their chances of being attacked, such as disabling their computer's microphone and camera.
- Establishing better cyber security practices is a matter of unlearning bad habits, and creating better ones.
The sheer number of massive data breaches and known security vulnerabilities online today should be enough to scare us into better data safety practices. However, though these issues seem to consistently elicit gasps and condemnations by talking heads and private users, little else is done. It's not about turning office and personal computers into Fort Knox, really, it's about using common sense and exercising caution.
According to the 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime Report, businesses fall for ransomware attacks every 14 seconds. Cybercrime is also on the rise, with some estimates putting the cost of online crimes at roughly $6 trillion by 2021. In this increasingly risky landscape, it makes sense to invest heavily in antivirus, anti-malware, and overall protection tools. However, these applications can only take you so far.
At some point, the problem isn't that hackers are too smart for us, but that we, in a false sense of security, believe we can let our guard down, which leads us to ignore standard security practices that significantly reduce chances of our being attacked. Here are some no-brainer security steps that we constantly overlook but should start keeping in mind.
Browsing the web via VPN
While it may seem like an endless amusement park with everything you've ever wanted to find, the internet is a much darker than we'd like to imagine. Although it is undoubtedly a great tool and has significantly enhanced quality of life the world over, the internet also means our personal data is now exposed every time we browse the web or open an application online. Often, sites and bodies we see as the "safest" are often themselves invaders of our privacy such as internet service providers, governments, and giant tech companies.
Connecting to an unknown network can be dangerous — something nearly 92 percent of those who use public WiFi networks ignore. Undeniably, many have started to limit their activity online as their concerns about privacy (rightfully) grow. Yet, many people still happily browse the web without a care and continue to leave trails of data everywhere, creating noteworthy problems when their information is scanned and compromised.
According to Harold Li, Vice President at ExpressVPN: "In an era when we conduct the most crucial and sensitive parts of our lives online, a VPN is a critical tool for protecting both digital privacy and security. They increase your anonymity online, shield your online activity from monitoring by ISPs and governments, and defend your data from hackers on shared networks such as public Wi-Fi." Even so, most of us continue to neglect VPNs. In fact, according to VPN Mentor, only 5 percent of internet users in the U.S. have a VPN.
Protecting Google docs
As we become increasingly reliant on the cloud, one of the first things we've migrated is our ability to do work. McAfee's 2019 Cloud Adoption and Risk Report found that for the past six years running, the "file sharing and collaboration services" category — services such as Google Docs — has been the leading driver of cloud use in business, accounting for nearly 21 percent of services in use at the average company.
According to the study, today, some 83 percent of organizations store sensitive data in the cloud, and about 8 percent of all cloud-shared documents include sensitive information. Moreover, we're sharing these files more than we used to, with significant year-over-year rises in documents set for open access to "anyone with a link."
This is problematic for two reasons. On one hand, the ease with which we can share documents increases the likelihood that they will be intercepted. On the other, as user bases stratify around services they use, SaaS platforms gain access to sensitive corporate assets unbeknownst to even the IT team. This is what's known as "shadow IT."
In remarks to Techopedia, Uri Haramati, the CEO of SaaS management platform company Torii , noted that "Considering the rampant threat of cyberattacks, security risks are definitely something companies have to be wary of."
On the other hand, "The fact that they are trying out new tools, means that they want to be better at their work," according to Haramati. "Why should management dampen such a positive attitude? Instead, leaders should value their employees' drive to be better and find out how their existing processes can be improved upon."
Disabling your microphone and camera
Recently, video conferencing service Zoom was revealed to have major flaws that allow hackers to theoretically take over unsuspecting users' webcams with a single URL. This may seem like a less threatening incident than having data stolen, but it can be just as damaging. A malicious third party with unfettered access to your webcam can discern much about your personal habits and can potentially witness and record damaging or embarrassing situations. In the U.K., for instance, there have been recorded incidents of hackers capturing these moments and threatening to upload them to social media unless a ransom is paid.
The problem is similar with microphones, which can be used to track your communications even when your devices are "off." Most A.I.-based assistants today, for instance (such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Home) are constantly listening, and companies have people on the other side listening to these recordings, as was discovered recently with Siri. Simply turning off your microphone manually can give you significant protection.
Using Encrypted Communications
It may sound straight out of a James Bond movie, but encryption is quickly becoming one of the most important technology fields in our digitized world. Even with a VPN and robust protection, it's still not impossible for someone to access our communications while they're in transit between us and the recipients. In fact, as our messaging applications expand in number and importance, governments, law enforcement and nefarious actors' interest in them is rising.
Many services do offer powerful encryption tools and features, but people often remain on the most popular chat apps because of convenience and familiarity. Facebook Messenger remains one of the most popular tools (despite belonging to a decidedly anti-privacy corporation), while Chinese apps like WeChat and Tencent's QQ Mobile are also main players despite the fact that they're both heavily monitored by the Chinese Government.
Facebook's Messenger, for instance, only offers optional end-to-end encryption (even though WhatsApp, which Facebook also owns, provides E2E by default). This doesn't even account for emails, which remain the most popular online communication method. Even when sending sensitive data, we're more than happy to send it via Gmail or Yahoo! and completely ignore the fact that there is little we can do once those emails leave our inboxes to protect the information we've shared.
Start small
Establishing better cyber security practices doesn't require a computer science degree and a military budget. What it needs is attention to detail, unlearning bad habits, and creating new ones. As the number of vectors available to hackers, scammers, data miners and governments continue to expand, it won't be big things that cause breaches, but rather something as small as leaving a webcam on, forgetting a password, or sending a compromising email without considering who may view it.
From Your Site Articles
- What Netflix's“Great Hack” tells us about the future of data - Big Think ›
- RIP, Privacy? The Strange Paradox of How We Act Online. - Big Think ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Popular
This is what aliens would 'hear' if they flew by Earth
A Mercury-bound spacecraft's noisy flyby of our home planet.
13 May, 2020
Image source: sdecoret on Shutterstock/ESA/Big Think
Surprising Science
- There is no sound in space, but if there was, this is what it might sound like passing by Earth.
- A spacecraft bound for Mercury recorded data while swinging around our planet, and that data was converted into sound.
- Yes, in space no one can hear you scream, but this is still some chill stuff.
First off, let's be clear what we mean by "hear" here. (Here, here!)
Sound, as we know it, requires air. What our ears capture is actually oscillating waves of fluctuating air pressure. Cilia, fibers in our ears, respond to these fluctuations by firing off corresponding clusters of tones at different pitches to our brains. This is what we perceive as sound.
All of which is to say, sound requires air, and space is notoriously void of that. So, in terms of human-perceivable sound, it's silent out there. Nonetheless, there can be cyclical events in space — such as oscillating values in streams of captured data — that can be mapped to pitches, and thus made audible.
BepiColombo
Image source: European Space Agency
The European Space Agency's BepiColombo spacecraft took off from Kourou, French Guyana on October 20, 2019, on its way to Mercury. To reduce its speed for the proper trajectory to Mercury, BepiColombo executed a "gravity-assist flyby," slinging itself around the Earth before leaving home. Over the course of its 34-minute flyby, its two data recorders captured five data sets that Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) enhanced and converted into sound waves.
Into and out of Earth's shadow
In April, BepiColombo began its closest approach to Earth, ranging from 256,393 kilometers (159,315 miles) to 129,488 kilometers (80,460 miles) away. The audio above starts as BepiColombo begins to sneak into the Earth's shadow facing away from the sun.
The data was captured by BepiColombo's Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA) instrument. Says Carmelo Magnafico of the ISA team, "When the spacecraft enters the shadow and the force of the Sun disappears, we can hear a slight vibration. The solar panels, previously flexed by the Sun, then find a new balance. Upon exiting the shadow, we can hear the effect again."
In addition to making for some cool sounds, the phenomenon allowed the ISA team to confirm just how sensitive their instrument is. "This is an extraordinary situation," says Carmelo. "Since we started the cruise, we have only been in direct sunshine, so we did not have the possibility to check effectively whether our instrument is measuring the variations of the force of the sunlight."
When the craft arrives at Mercury, the ISA will be tasked with studying the planets gravity.
Magentosphere melody
The second clip is derived from data captured by BepiColombo's MPO-MAG magnetometer, AKA MERMAG, as the craft traveled through Earth's magnetosphere, the area surrounding the planet that's determined by the its magnetic field.
BepiColombo eventually entered the hellish mangentosheath, the region battered by cosmic plasma from the sun before the craft passed into the relatively peaceful magentopause that marks the transition between the magnetosphere and Earth's own magnetic field.
MERMAG will map Mercury's magnetosphere, as well as the magnetic state of the planet's interior. As a secondary objective, it will assess the interaction of the solar wind, Mercury's magnetic field, and the planet, analyzing the dynamics of the magnetosphere and its interaction with Mercury.
Recording session over, BepiColombo is now slipping through space silently with its arrival at Mercury planned for 2025.
Study helps explain why motivation to learn declines with age
Research suggests that aging affects a brain circuit critical for learning and decision-making.
27 October, 2020
Photo by Reinhart Julian on Unsplash
Mind & Brain
As people age, they often lose their motivation to learn new things or engage in everyday activities. In a study of mice, MIT neuroscientists have now identified a brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation.
<p>This circuit is particularly important for learning to make decisions that require evaluating the cost and reward that come with a particular action. The researchers showed that they could boost older mice's motivation to engage in this type of learning by reactivating this circuit, and they could also decrease motivation by suppressing the circuit.</p><p>"As we age, it's harder to have a get-up-and-go attitude toward things," says Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at MIT and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. "This get-up-and-go, or engagement, is important for our social well-being and for learning — it's tough to learn if you aren't attending and engaged."</p><p>Graybiel is the senior author of the study, which appears today in <em>Cell</em>. The paper's lead authors are Alexander Friedman, a former MIT research scientist who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Emily Hueske, an MIT research scientist.</p>
<h3>Evaluating cost and benefit</h3><p>The striatum is part of the basal ganglia — a collection of brain centers linked to habit formation, control of voluntary movement, emotion, and addiction. For several decades, Graybiel's lab has been studying clusters of cells called striosomes, which are distributed throughout the striatum. Graybiel discovered striosomes many years ago, but their function had remained mysterious, in part because they are so small and deep within the brain that it is difficult to image them with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).</p><p>In recent years, Friedman, Graybiel, and colleagues including MIT research fellow Ken-ichi Amemori have discovered that striosomes <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2015/brain-circuit-controls-decisions-causing-anxiety-0528" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">play an important role</a> in a type of decision-making known as approach-avoidance conflict. These decisions involve choosing whether to take the good with the bad — or to avoid both — when given options that have both positive and negative elements. An example of this kind of decision is having to choose whether to take a job that pays more but forces a move away from family and friends. Such decisions often provoke great anxiety.</p><p>In a <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2016/neural-connections-linked-emotional-decision-making-0919" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">related study</a>, Graybiel's lab found that striosomes connect to cells of the substantia nigra, one of the brain's major dopamine-producing centers. These studies led the researchers to hypothesize that striosomes may be acting as a gatekeeper that absorbs sensory and emotional information coming from the cortex and integrates it to produce a decision on how to act. These actions can then be invigorated by the dopamine-producing cells.</p><p>The researchers later discovered that chronic stress has a major impact on this circuit and on this kind of emotional decision-making. In a <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2017/stress-can-lead-risky-decisions-1116" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2017 study</a> performed in rats and mice, they showed that stressed animals were far more likely to choose high-risk, high-payoff options, but that they could block this effect by manipulating the circuit.</p>
<p>In the new <em>Cell</em> study, the researchers set out to investigate what happens in striosomes as mice learn how to make these kinds of decisions. To do that, they measured and analyzed the activity of striosomes as mice learned to choose between positive and negative outcomes.</p><p>During the experiments, the mice heard two different tones, one of which was accompanied by a reward (sugar water), and another that was paired with a mildly aversive stimulus (bright light). The mice gradually learned that if they licked a spout more when they heard the first tone, they would get more of the sugar water, and if they licked less during the second, the light would not be as bright.</p><p>Learning to perform this kind of task requires assigning value to each cost and each reward. The researchers found that as the mice learned the task, striosomes showed higher activity than other parts of the striatum, and that this activity correlated with the mice's behavioral responses to both of the tones. This suggests that striosomes could be critical for assigning subjective value to a particular outcome.</p><p>"In order to survive, in order to do whatever you are doing, you constantly need to be able to learn. You need to learn what is good for you, and what is bad for you," Friedman says.</p><p>"A person, or this case a mouse, may value a reward so highly that the risk of experiencing a possible cost is overwhelmed, while another may wish to avoid the cost to the exclusion of all rewards. And these may result in reward-driven learning in some and cost-driven learning in others," Hueske says.</p><p>The researchers found that inhibitory neurons that relay signals from the prefrontal cortex help striosomes to enhance their signal-to-noise ratio, which helps to generate the strong signals that are seen when the mice evaluate a high-cost or high-reward option.</p>
<h3>Loss of motivation</h3><p>Next, the researchers found that in older mice (between 13 and 21 months, roughly equivalent to people in their 60s and older), the mice's engagement in learning this type of cost-benefit analysis went down. At the same time, their striosomal activity declined compared to that of younger mice. The researchers found a similar loss of motivation in a mouse model of Huntington's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects the striatum and its striosomes.</p><p>When the researchers used genetically targeted drugs to boost activity in the striosomes, they found that the mice became more engaged in performance of the task. Conversely, suppressing striosomal activity led to disengagement.</p><p>In addition to normal age-related decline, many mental health disorders can skew the ability to evaluate the costs and rewards of an action, from anxiety and depression to conditions such as PTSD. For example, a depressed person may undervalue potentially rewarding experiences, while someone suffering from addiction may overvalue drugs but undervalue things like their job or their family.</p><p>The researchers are now working on possible drug treatments that could stimulate this circuit, and they suggest that training patients to enhance activity in this circuit through biofeedback could offer another potential way to improve their cost-benefit evaluations.</p><p>"If you could pinpoint a mechanism which is underlying the subjective evaluation of reward and cost, and use a modern technique that could manipulate it, either psychiatrically or with biofeedback, patients may be able to activate their circuits correctly," Friedman says.</p><p>The research was funded by the CHDI Foundation, the Saks Kavanaugh Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, the Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia and Parkinson's Foundation, the William N. and Bernice E. Bumpus Foundation, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Kristin R. Pressman and Jessica J. Pourian '13 Fund, Michael Stiefel, and Robert Buxton.</p><p>Reprinted with permission of <a href="http://news.mit.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MIT News</a>. Read the <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2020/why-learn-motivate-age-decline-1027" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
Keep reading
Show less
Scientists discover why fish evolved limbs and left water
Researchers find a key clue to the evolution of bony fish and tetrapods.
27 October, 2020
Surprising Science
- A new study says solar and lunar tide impacts led to the evolution of bony fish and tetrapods.
- The scientists show that tides created tidal pools, stranding fish and forcing them to get out of the water.
- The researchers ran computer simulations to get their results.
<p>Tides influenced by the sun and the moon were likely the reason why fish developed limbs and early tetrapods evolved, found new research.</p><p>The groundbreaking study took a look at tides during the Late Silurian—Devonian periods, which happened between 420 million years ago and 380 million years ago.</p><p>The scientists built their work on the theory that the Moon's mass and specific location along its orbit can greatly affect vast tidal ranges across Earth and can create tidal pools. Because they are isolated from each other, the pools provided the biological motivation for fish stranded by high tides to eventually grow limbs. </p>
<p>The study involved researchers from from UK's Bangor University and Oxford University as well as Uppsala University in Sweden. They devised very detailed numerical simulations that proved the existence of large tides during the period they studied. They are first to tie tidal hydrodynamics to an evolutionary biological event, states the <a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-10-23-large-tides-may-have-been-key-factor-evolution-bony-fish-and-tetrapods" target="_blank">press release</a> from the University of Oxford.</p><p>To come up with the simulations, the scientists employed <em>paleogeography</em>, the study of historical geography, to reconstruct the Earth's continents within the numerical model. The calculations showed tides over four meters happening around the South China block. That area holds the known origin site of the earliest bony fish we know and has been a treasure-trove of the earliest fossils of that nature. Geological evidence also supports changes in tides to be lined to these fossils.</p>
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains the Tides
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9913a65f847775722d7c23d40d78938b"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dBwNadry-TU?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Large tidal ranges could have fostered both the evolution of air-breathing organs in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteichthyes" target="_blank">osteichthyans</a> to facilitate breathing in oxygen-depleted tidal pools, and the development of weight-bearing tetrapod limbs to aid navigation within the intertidal zones," states the paper.</p><p>The researchers believe further tidal simulations from early Earth can be used to recreate that far past with greater detail. The findings can help us understand more what roles tides played in diversifying early vertebrates or in causing extinction events. </p><p>Check out the study published in <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0355" target="_blank"><em>Proceedings of the Royal Society A</em>.</a></p>
<p class=""><br></p>
Keep reading
Show less
Coronavirus
Optimism may be dangerous in a pandemic, say behavioral psychologists
Most people believe themselves to be less at risk from COVID-19 than others similar to them, according to a recent UCL survey conducted in the U.S.
Scroll down to load more…
