One of the largest misconceptions I hear from college students is that having a secure password means they are safe. While having a secure password is a good step, there are many more things that a college student should do to protect their online information from being hacked. As we discussed in class, there was recently a security breach in the iCloud in which hackers got into celebrities accounts, and I would venture a guess that those celebrities had fairly secure passwords. As seen in “3Q’s: Password and cloud Security,” there are many things aside from just having a secure password which we should do to protect our online privacy. As we saw with Professor Bruff’s example in class, there are ways to get around just a password such as security questions, or using brute force to guess the password, so a password alone is not enough.
The primary thing I wish to highlight that college students should apply is two-factor authentication. This should be applied not only to the cloud, but to all other accounts that have this as an option. Two-factor authentication simply means that you need some other way to access your accounts than just provide a password, such as a code in an email or text message. This means if someone wants to access your account then they have to not only have your password, but have access to the other method you require to access your account. This significantly increases the difficulty for someone trying to hack into your account while only adding a minor inconvenience to yourself. At the end of the day however, anything which you put online can be found by anyone, so the best thing to do is always be careful with what you put online.
