Q: How can you tell if your computer is safe?
A:
Most people would agree that cybersecurity has grown to be an incredibly important aspect of business and companies; however, when it comes to users own personal devices, security may seem more like an afterthought. In reality, even personal security is extremely important, as there’s loads of personal information that anyone with the right skills and tools can break into. In order to determine if a computer is safe, you should first identify the security measures you already have in place on the device; furthermore, you should also identify if any changes were made to any important files or data on the computer. Based on the state of your computer, the way that you go about protecting it depends, but there are some important things to keep in mind. For instance, if you don’t have a password or have a simple password, you should opt for a more complex password that’s harder for brute-force attacks and dictionary-attacks to break into (such as mixing Uppercase, lowercase, numbered, and symbolled characters). Furthermore, to protect your computer from getting any malware or virus attacks, you should install both a firewall to block any open ports and antimalware software to safely remove and mitigate damage caused by malware. Another way to protect your computer while going through the internet is using Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, so that no one can gain access to your actual network. The best ways that you can protect your computer and its information is through creating proper backups of the system and its files (that can be restored in case of a large-scale attack) or through encryption, or the process of using “code to hide a message or data”, of the entire system (Anon 2018). Popular ways to encrypt your data in Windows can be found through EFS (Encrypting File System) for individual files or through Bitlocker for the entire system. In the end, any of these are good ways to tell that your computer is safe and secured from attacks.
References
- Anon, D. (2018, December 17). Introduction to cryptography: Encryption, digital signatures and much more. Privacy.net. Retrieved March 15, 2023, from https://privacy.net/cryptography/