A more malicious type of spam is phishing. Phishing is a social engineering technique cyber criminals use to acquire sensitive information by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in a seemingly official electronic notification or message.
Other common malicious emails masquerade as invitations to see photos of family or friends, greeting cards, pleas for disaster relief assistance, or other intriguing headlines.
These emails play on your emotions to try to get you to react without thinking. So always beware of messages where someone is threatening to close an account or take away privileges unless you provide personal information. Remember that social engineers are trying to use your trusting nature and fear of trouble against you.
The key to password strength is length and complexity
As you just learned, a poorly chosen password may result in the compromise of individual systems, data or the entire University of Arizona network. Therefore, it’s important that your NetID password is as long and complex as is feasible.
Passwords should be easy for you to remember, but difficult for other people to guess.
Some people find creating a password that is associated with a phrase (also known as a passphrase) is easier to remember. By virtue of its length, a passphrase is stronger than a password. It could be a line from your favorite song, the punch line of a joke, three or more words in a row, or anything else. However, be careful about using dictionary words, movie titles, famous quotes, etc., as these have been added to password cracker dictionaries. So, if you opt to use a well-known phrase, sentence, question, or quote, you should always add a twist. For example, if you use a well know question -- such as “why did the chicken cross the road?” -- add a word in the middle.
Another suggestion for creating a complex yet easy to remember password is to use a fake (and we emphasize fake) website address, email address, and the like.
Unfortunately, not all services support long passwords.
For those accounts that do allow longer passwords, what matters is the complexity you add to make it secure. The more nonsensical, the better!
For these instances you can use a phrase, random statement or compound word, shorten it and make it nonsensical by inserting numbers and special characters. Take the example here using the compound word “wildthing,” where we have added complexity by using uppercase, lowercase, and inserting numbers and special characters.
It’s important to note that you should never use published example password/passphrases, such as the ones used in this presentation.
Networking sites have become very popular online, but can also be places that identity thieves use to capture personal information they can use against you.
Make sure that you adjust your privacy settings to protect yourself, and be careful about who you accept as a friend.
Once you have accepted someone as your friend they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. You can remove friends at any time, should you change your mind about someone.