What you can do to protect your devices and prevent cyber-attacks

• Being aware of your security and the preventative measures you can take in cyberspace is essential to keeping your work and personal space safe

The world of cyberspace is an open place where many interactions can take place, from working, to shopping, even doing social activities. These activities are harmless, but through certain vulnerabilities cybercriminals or cyberterrorists can take advantage of them to steal sensitive information, carry out sabotage or cyberespionage. All this through our ICT devices and the use we make of them.

A device connected to the network is something we all have in our homes and in most workplaces, interconnectivity is part of our everyday lives. But this connection is the gateway of our networked life to the rest of the cyberspace world, we will decide how robust and secure our gateway will be.

Data theft and identity theft are common actions in cybercrime, which are carried out through different types of malware, including Trojans, spyware, viruses, worms... The latter are self-replicating, which means that an infection can infect other computers with shared networks.

Knowing the means and targets of cybercriminals and cyberterrorists, we need to be more aware of what we have to do to protect ourselves. Cybersecurity is not just one measure, but a layer of many measures, protection comes first through prevention and then through the different forms of security we can provide for ourselves in cyberspace.

Secure passwords are a basic for the protection of our accounts, 12-digit passwords make them practically impregnable if they do not follow a logical rule, that is to say,  if they are not proper names, important dates, related to our personal data. Also to protect our accounts we must activate the two-step verification so that we are warned when someone tries to enter our accounts and authorise the entries.

In order to protect our devices we should always keep software up to date and avoid unsupported operating system versions. Antivirus are good tools to detect malicious software or without the required security guarantees.

Often malware enters our devices because we install it ourselves, the use of pirated software can include malware, or clicking on unknown links (phishing) can open the door of our devices to all kinds of malware that can self-install itself on our device.

Self-protection also depends on how much we reveal and how much we offer to cybercriminals - the more valuable what we reveal, the more damage they can do to us. We should avoid giving out personal, private or security-related information, such as our home address, photos of our car, timetables or if we are on holiday with our house alone and empty. We must understand that our cyber environment is like our real environment and we must filter the people we want to see us, having a secure environment that can access us is key to avoid many malicious practices.