Cybersecurity and Its Real Threat

Throughout his entire campaign, new President-elect Donald Trump talked repeatedly about the need to defend America's infrastructure against cyber warfare. He insisted that America was being hacked constantly, that we were weak and being exploited by foreign governments, and he would =spend a lot of money to reduce the risk of that continuing to happen.

But what is the real risk of cyber warfare? The truth is that the fear of cyber threats isn't nearly as large for the government and their secured compounds and infrastructure as it should be for normal, everyday Americans.

2016 saw the number of connected devices increase to 6.8 billion, a 30% increase over 2016. This is a massive, exponentially growing number of ways to make our private information and subsequently our entire lives vulnerable. Millions of cyber attacks are launched daily by criminals and hackers attempting to get into your Facebook account, your bank account, or, even worse, your phone.

What's truly terrifying about the everyday risk of these attacks is that they're so preventable, yet so many do nothing to fight against them. Not to victim blame, but a little bit of security against a common criminal and you're a lot better off to not get hugely inconvenienced.

First, make sure you have two-factor authentication running on every website that allows you to have it. This means that when you try to log onto a site with your username and password, it will also do something like shoot you a text with a code to enter. This means that even the craftiest of hackers cannot get into your account, because they'd have to get access to your phone first.

Second, ensure that you aren't using the same password on different websites. Many websites are compromised by criminals that sell the username and password combinations on the black market to the highest bidder. You want to make sure that you're changing your passwords somewhat regularly, but also that they are unique to that particular site.

These tips should help you guard against the real threats that are out there on the internet. We should be focused less on terrorists hitting our power plants and more on giving ourselves a little personal peace of mind.