DATA SECURITY AND YOU! W/ DAVE California Center for Population Research

What is it? “Data security is the means of ensuring that data is kept safe from corruption and that access to it is suitably controlled.” -Wikipediadatacorruption “The term data means groups of information that represent the qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables.” -Wikipediavariable

By no fault of our own…  December 12 th, UCLA suffers from one of the largest data security breeches ever  In recent years security breaches have increased in frequency and scope: -CardSystems Solutions -Heartland Payment

Daily Risks  One common risk on the web - financial, medical, social, collaborative = the password.  Keyloggers, trojans, malware  Network risks: man-in-the-middle (example), unencrypted wirelessexample  Physical risks: natural disasters – earthquakes, equipment theft

Minimizing Risk  Current and Active backups of all data  Data Encryption  Physical security – thumb drives, laptops  Use your head – Phishing attempts – don’t open unsolicited mail, inappropriate sites, never asked for password  Often overlooked: Invest in a UPS

Best Practices…  Use c0mP13x passwords! And don’t share  Anti-virus software, enable firewalls  Keep OS and browsers up to date – allow updates to occur  Never use public terminals for anything “private”  Verify HTTPS (secure http) is being used when doing online banking, shopping etc.  Lock your desktop - easy as WindowsKey+L  Shred sensitive documents, smash hard drives, destroy media

Data Security Tools  encryption, secure erasure, creation of personal VPN, Antivirus, collaboration and file sharing  TrueCrypt for Encryption – BitLocker  Hamachi for personal VPN  Freeraser for secure erasing  Sophos, AVG or Panda Cloud  MalwareBytes for Malware Removal:

Back It Up!  Online backup services  Carbonite example  Mirroring local disk – external drive  Cobian Backup, Robocopy script, Built-in >robocopy C:\mydata D:\backup /MIR  Synchronization tools –  Dropbox (dropbox.com), Syncplicity (syncplicity.com)

In Conclusion…  Backups!  Passwords!  Stay Updated!  Try Security Tools!  Use Common Sense!