Encrypt like everyone’s watching – because someone probably is!

It’s week 3 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM).

The official #CyberAware theme for this week is Connected Communities and Families: Staying Protected While We Are Always Connected.

We thought that was a bit of a lungful, so we simplified it a bit and turned it into a reminder:

Stay secure, wherever you are.

Security does get trickier when you’re on the move, for a variety of reasons.

For example, you probably have a network at work that you share with your colleagues,

But there’s also the network at home that you share with your family, a network at the coffee shop that you share with everyone else in the food court, and the 3G/LTE network accessible via your mobile phone that you share with all the other customers of your ISP.

On each of those networks, you might end up using different devices – laptops, tablets, phones, for instance – at different times.

And, on top of that, you may also end up sharing and synching data between your devices automatically, using the cloud.

But “uploading data into the cloud” is very much the same as “saving it on someone else’s hard disk.”

• They might not intend to read your data, yet might access it by mistake.

• They might not intend to let anyone else see your data, yet get hacked and expose it without even knowing.

• They might actively want no-one else to see it, yet be required by a court, perhaps in another jurisdiction, to turn it over anyway.

Those are some of the reasons, if you listen to our weekly Chet Chat podcasts, why you will frequently hear us advising you to encrypt your data even when you have bunch of reasons why you don’t really need to.

In a similar vein, supporting security and privacy by default is why more and more websites are switching to HTTPS-only, even if their web pages contain content that is uncontroversial and intended for public consumption.

If you encrypt everything, or at least as much as you reasonably can, then you don’t have to worry about files that are more important than you realised, or that you’d forgotten about, or that you didn’t even know you had.

Why not take 5 minutes to make yourself #CyberAware about encryption by joining in our Encryption Dance?

We’ve put together a web page that mixes humour and education (and puts your Igpay Atinlay to the test) with a pair of entertaining short videos.

Encrypt like everyone’s watching, because someone probably is.

Image of besuited bloke with binocs courtesy of Shutterstock.