CyberSecurity 101

As we hear more stories of systems and services being compromised by malicious attackers, often simply referred to as ‘hackers’, we need to be aware of the basics of how these attacks work and what we should be looking out for in our daily tech lives.

We’re probably all fed up of the increasing complexity of logging into our favourite websites and apps, but the reality is that passwords, multi-factor authentication and now ‘passwordless’ ways of proving our online identity are more important than ever.

Talking with Sascz, we try to address some of the common questions around keeping ourselves safe in a digital world, as well as wincing at some of the painful examples we’ve seen of bad security habits that make even 16309, 12345, or 000 Destruct 0 look like strong password choices.

This is absolutely an episode where we want to hear your feedback, your experiences, and maybe things you’ve learned from our discussion. Maybe you have a different viewpoint on some of the things we’ve raised, so please send a note over to podcast@crossedwires.net, leave a comment on the post, or join the discussion over on our Discord server

If you liked this episode or any of our content, we’d greatly appreciate any little bit of support you can throw our way over at our Ko-Fi page.

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Episode Links

• Alexander (Sascz) Hermann: Website | Twitter
• Time-based one-time password (TOTP – WikiPedia
• You Should be Afraid of SIM Swaps – Malicious Life
• iCloud Hide My Email
• Fastmail Masked Email
• Free Password Generator by 1Password
• Password Managers
  • 1Password
  • BitWarden
  • KeePass
  • iCloud Keychain
• WSJ Journal Article: Criminals Use iPhones To Steal Digital Lives
• Password Entropy: The Value of Unpredictable Passwords (Okta)
• About the Security of Passkeys (Apple)
• Windows Hello

Chapter Times

1. 00:00:04: Introductions
2. 00:02:16: AFFILIATE PROMO: Linode
3. 00:03:12: Guest Intro – Alexander
4. 00:08:27: An Old Problem
5. 00:11:51: Vulnerabilities
6. 00:15:10: Social Engineering
7. 00:26:38: Being Mindful of Social Media Posts
8. 00:31:44: Software Updates
9. 00:36:47: Endpoint Security
10. 00:40:15: Protecting the Average User
11. 00:47:42: Protecting Our Phones
12. 00:56:26: Whole Disk Encryption
13. 00:57:20: Multi Factor Authentication
14. 01:04:58: Passwords Matter
15. 01:10:48: Strong Passwords & Password Generation
16. 01:20:50: Corporate Authentication
17. 01:26:37: Zero Trust
18. 01:28:00: Password Managers
19. 01:38:17: Passwordless
20. 01:45:18: Wrapping Up

Credits

Intro and outro theme: Ace of Clubs by RoccoW