© 2024
Virginia's Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Keeping Hackers Out

https://www.flickr.com/help/general/#147

Recent hacking incidents have put Cyber Security on the agenda.  The President will talk about it in his State of the Union Address next week.  So what can you do to promote cyber safety? 

Be unique.  Be secure.  Change your password.  Those and other warnings are plastered on the walls at the Information Technology Office at Virginia Tech. Experts say the biggest challenge is that things change so quickly in cyber space.  But one thing is clear, words like safety and ‘security’ now apply to the virtual world as much as, the physical world.

“Traditionally, we thought of security from the physical perspective, and that’s where you think ‘your police force,’ But as we become more dependent on technology that non physical, electronic environment on the network, those security issues have a greater impact on people,” says Scot Ransbottom, Deputy Director of the IT Security Lab at Virginia Tech.

“There’s an increasing number of organized threat actors that are operating in cyber space and that’s what is causing the increase in sensitization and it’s what’s causing the increase in threat if you will.”

But there are some simple things you can do to keep hackers out. Randy Marchany is Director of Tech’s IT Security office. He points out that hackers leave clues when they try to login using robots to guess likely passwords until they find yours. It’s called a brute force guessing attack.

“If my computer is set up correctly, it’s going to log all those failures.  It’s going to say, I’m trying to guess Robbie’s password and fail, fail, fail. And if you see a whole bunch of failures you know somebody is targeting you for a simple guessing attack,” says Marchany. 

And while the guessing attack is not a hack - it’s just like a thief checking a door to see if it’s locked, Marchany says it’s important to check your computer’s log for signs like this and make sure there are firewalls and antivirus software in place.  Because robotic hackers co-opt unprotected computers and use them to hack their targets, one door left open along that path is all they need to find a way in.  

Robbie Harris is based in Blacksburg, covering the New River Valley and southwestern Virginia.
Related Content