End User Security

You are as strong as the weakest link in a chain. This may surprise you but it is true that Humans are the weakest link in chain of security. Yes, the most intelligent animal on the earth himself is the most vulnerable one in terms of security and privacy. The main reason for this is the fact that humans themselves pose threat to each other. Driven by the feelings of anger, hatred and greed they can become each other’s foe and with the intent to cause harm can intrude the privacy of other person and compromise their security.

The victim person cannot stop someone from trying to harm but if
proper care is taken, he can safe guard himself. Living in digital era where technology has formed a major part of our lives, user should be aware about the attacks that can occur and what measures should be taken to in order to prevent these attacks. One of the most common type of attack is social engineering; which means someone can access your online accounts, delete your most personal data, and otherwise ruin your digital life without having to write a single line of code.

This may already sound scary but what makes them even more scary is the fact that these are pretty easy to carry out and all they require is a little bit of your public information.

So, what should we do to safeguard ourselves from these? First and foremost is stop revealing facts about your life to strangers. What may appear a harmless information to you can be exploited by an attacker in order to harm you.

For example, many people base their passwords on their hobbies, that they openly
disclose on social media and can be known by anyone who views their online profiles. Moreover, the habit of reusing same passwords everywhere should be stopped. Memorizing several passwords is difficult, true but it is better than compromising privacy. One should beware of mails and messages asking to disclose personal information on account of a lottery / reward etc. that have been won.

It doesn’t matter if these scams ask for seemingly harmless information. Anything that is used to verify your identity on various platforms — where you grew up, your pet’s name, your current address — can be used to gain access to your data. Another type of attack that happens on end users is Client-side attacks. Client-side attacks require the user to do something, like download an image, open a link, install an update that will then run the code in their machine. The client-side attacks require user interaction that’s why information safeguarding is very important. The attacker gathers the information about an individual’s applications and who they are as a person. To do client-side attack successfully,one needs to know the friends of a person, what network and website they use, and what website they trust. In client-side attack, when the attacker gathers information,history focus is the person, rather than their applications or operating system. A way to safeguard yourself from these is to not visit unknown websites and not opening attachments from unknown people.

Moreover, Pirated software should not be downloaded as they may have a malware and can cause harm to your system or can access your personal information.

Physical attacks on users also happen most commonly. Physical attacks mean the attacks that maybe carried out by an attacker physically like he/she maybe a friend or pretend to be a friend abd physically get enough access into your life to break down into your cyber-privacy

Being alert and not revealing your passwords to others is a way to prevent this. Also while entering passwords make sure you cover the key board so that other person can not see it. Make passwords complicated by adding special characters with text which are not easy to guess and take a lot more effort to break down. And above all trust no one with your passwords because the weakest link in security is the human factor or we can say the end user is the weakest link and that is what attackers are counting on.

100 percent privacy and security can never be guaranteed but the only way to ensure enough privacy and security is to stay self aware and alert by ourselves. There are hundreds of guides available throughout the internet that give sufficient information about ensuring end user security. One should go through them in order to ensure his/her own security and be always aware. Security is nothing if one doesnt know what to do in order to ensure it.

So stay aware! Stay cyber-safe.