Security and Privacy in Our Social World - A Common Sense Approach

A Common Sense Approach
Having a balanced approach in any endeavor is important to its success. Getting educated and having a perspective avoids any extreme approach to solve a problem. Hence we should not not get too paranoid or too complacent on the privacy and security aspect of the social internet. Get educated and take a common sense approach.

The What and the Who
First we have to get educated understand what we are trying to secure and keep private. Next we need to know who we are trying to keep our information/data secure and private from. We need to know our weakness and also know our enemy. Once we have figured that out we can then take appropriate and reasonable action.

Defining The What
Essentially any information that can cause economic loss or loss of privacy and consequently threat to life can be considered at risk. Most common examples of these are SSN’s, Credit Cards, Bank Accounts, Contacts, personal relationships, personal and business communications, business and trade secrets, our client information etc. Such information is at stake here and needs to be protected. Most of such information is freely flowing through cyberspace and stored in the cloud. All such information is either in a database of your bank or in the e-mail systems that we use.

Defining The Who
Essentially we are mostly up against dishonest people.  These people can be folks who can range from being naïve and harmless to sophisticated and evil in their intention and knowledge. These can be broadly categorized into three parts of a pyramid.

1)     Bottom of the pyramid. – approximately 70%
These are unsophisticated, semi-sophisticated or sophisticated folks with not so good intentions. These could be rogue marketers that could hack your e-mail and send your friends spam, other evil charlatans that are seeking your money and cover an estranged and/or dishonest co-worker, family, neighbor or friend.  
Threat Category: Individual, Small Business.

2)    Middle of the pyramid. – Approximately 28%
Ultra sophisticated hackers that attack corporations and entire network of internet computers with viruses or extremely evil intentions. These people are mostly following the money and/or espionage of information of economic or national value.
Threat Category: Banks, Medium businesses and Corporations.

3)    Top of the pyramid – Approximately 2%
These are government agencies and/or militaries of countries. They can easily hack an individual no matter how hard we try to stop it. But the good news is most likely they are not going to go after an average law abiding citizen.
Threat Category: Countries, Militaries.

Now that we have outlined what we need to secure and keep private as well as defined and categorized our adversary, we can respond with specific commonsense actions that will reduce our risk of breach in security and privacy of our information. In the next blog we will outline these actions and guidelies.