by Maleeha Sofi
SRINAGAR: With the world increasingly moving to virtual space, the Jammu and Kashmir government is also talking about maintaining Cyber-Hygiene which like personal hygiene is becoming a must-adhere practice.
Recently in a meeting in the Reasi district of Jammu Additional Deputy Commissioner Joyti Rani Salathia discussed an action plan for maintaining Cyber hygiene. The resource person detailed people about fake accounts and how criminals dupe thousands of innocent people by impersonating and other weird methods.
According to official data, Cyber Police Kashmir received over 300 complaints about the misuse of social media and over 400 cases of financial fraud in the year 2020.
According to data, in the first half of 2021, the global ransomware attacks hit 304.7 million. The numbers are only increasing with time. Cyber hygiene prevents cyber criminals from breaching personal data.
What Is Cyber Hygiene?
Cyber Hygiene keeps any device’s hardware and software safe and secure amid rising cybercrimes and cyber threats. Cyber hygiene is a step towards safety and security in the virtual world. It simply means training oneself to stay ahead of cyber threats and issues.
Cyber hygiene is helpful to solve problems like threats from hackers, phishing, malware, viruses, data loss, out-of-date software and old anti viruses. One needs to have a regular practice of cyber hygiene and use tools to avoid the risk. Network Firewalls, Data wiping software, password manager and high-quality antivirus software are a few tools that are helpful. Regular practices include Keeping passwords safe and secure, using multi-factor authentication, backing up data regularly, ensuring privacy, securing routers, avoiding social engineering attacks and encrypting devices.
Apart from all the basic threats, cyber hygiene means keeping the gadgets up to date including all the programmes, applications and software. It is not the responsibility of the IT security manager only but also of all individuals and organisations. Cyber Hygiene is not something that can be done once and for all. It needs to be done regularly.
Healthy cyber hygiene minimises the risk of operational interruptions, data compromise and data loss by improving its overall security posture. An organisation’s security posture means the overall strength of its cybersecurity programme.
Why to Maintain it?
Poor cyber hygiene may lead to security incidents, data compromise and data loss. A data breach may include financial loss, government fines, operational downtime, organisational upheaval, damage to the organisation’s reputation and legal liability.
While maintaining cyber hygiene, many challenges come forward such as the diverse and complex IT environment and the necessary requirement of support and engagement of end users.
