Cyber threats are not going away. If anything, they are growing increasingly personal—and that should frighten you, says cybersecurity expert Jeff Moulton.
“The cyber threat can never be eliminated,” Moulton said in his keynote speech Wednesday at Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week. “But that’s OK. Have we eradicated the flu? No. We haven’t done away with it or cured it. We’ve learn to live with it.”
Moulton—executive director of the Stephenson National Center for Security Research and Training and the Transformation Technologies and Cyber Research Center at LSU—said the responsibility falls on individuals and on individual businesses to protect confidential data in their possession.
“You’re going to start seeing businesses having to have cyber insurance,” Moulton predicted.
The problem is society has begun to favor convenience over privacy, as a proliferation of smart devices make their way into homes and workplaces, he said. The list of smart devices connected by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth grows by day: TVs, garage door openers, Fitbits, insulin pumps—even the tire pressure monitors in your car can be hacked. Yet people often don’t give a second thought to the threats these devices open them up to, Moulton said.
“You don’t know what you’ll get attacked from anymore,” he said. “If there’s an app for it, there’s an exploit for it. It’s no longer the internet of things—it’s the internet of you.”
Perhaps most concerning is that children are being targeted, he added, because children are 35 times more likely to have their identity stolen. To protect individuals and companies from the onslaught of cyber threats, Moulton provided his audience at Manship Theatre a number of tips:
- Knowledge is power—Read the fine print that comes with smart devices or just say no.
- When the device is not in use, turn it off. And change your home router SSID regularly.
- Check the credit reports of children ages 2 and up.
- If you can control it by an app, so can someone else.
- Never reuse a password.
- Have a paper copy of key documents.
- Do not let children use computers with important information
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—Annie Ourso Landry
