Secure your cyber education from two perspectives, secure it from the sense that you want to lock in this vital area of knowledge, and secure it also from the sense that it is cyber security that you should be focused on.
The double secure message indicates that it is time to change. Yes, indeed, now is the time to make a massive change and take your cyber security knowledge to the next level for personal, business and even career-related purposes.
Let’s go over some high-level education to get you started on the right footing.
There are a plethora of cyber threats to learn about; let’s list just a few so you can have a better grasp of of what you may delve into if your choose the cyber education path:
- The notorious emotet malware
- Whaling
- Ransomeware
- Trojan Viruses
- Pharming
Cybersecurity Explained at a High Level
Cybersecurity is similar in some ways to home security. Several measures or levels of homesecurity can be taken, such as an alarm system, video surveillance, motion detection, large gates, and more. Cybersecurity also has many layers of protection.
The Firewall Layer
When a remote hacker wants to hack a specific endpoint device such as a laptop, desktop or tablet, they need to travel over the internet to get to their target device. The Firewall layer directly relates to that.
Before even talking about anti-malware anti-virus solutions, firewalls or security appliances often protect the “main gate” to business or private home networks. Firewalls can detect the mal intended bits and bytes of data and “drop” the packets (deny entrance). When data travels over the internet it is broken into smaller chunks and then reassembled at its destination. A packet is a single chunk out of the many chunks of the message or data.
The Firewall layer in itself could have sublayers, for example, Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a built-in Firewall.
If your network firewall did not detect the threat or was not in place or running, the device level Firewall may fill that gap and block the malcious traffic.
The VPN Layer
A VPN is another layer of security as it masks your actual “physical” address. If a hacker is targeting you and knows your IP address, now with the VPN, your real IP address will be masked, and it will be much harder for the hacker to track you. With some VPN clients, you can connect to tens different locations globally and obtain IP addresses traced to those locations.
Also, all of your data will be encrypted no matter how insecure the network you are on, such as an insecure WiFi network you are connected to.
The Anti Malware Anti Virus Layer
Say the Firewall and the VPN did not help in a specific case, and the hacker reached your computer, and they are trying to run a malicious application such as to start a botnet cyberattack.
If you have comprehensive anti-malware cyber security installed on that computer, there is a good chance that whatever they are trying to run will be detected and blocked.
Your most sensible first step in securing your education is downloading a free trial of a comprehensive cyber security solution from a reputable cyber security firm. If you like the product, simply purchase the full version. This company should have a lot of internal blogs, glossary and other information which will undoubtedly contribute to your cyber security education journey.
