Awareness in Cybersecurity
Last updated: 2022-11-04
The University Institute of Lisbon (Iscte) has joined the initiative “Cybersecurity Awareness” in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), a collaboration project between the Collaborative Network MetaRed and the Cybersecurity Institute of Spain (INCIBE).
The #ProtegeOTeuCampus (https://www.metared.org/pt/ProtegeOTeuCampus.html) campaign aims to raise awareness and inform academic communities about the risks and best practices in the area of cybersecurity. It makes sense that young people learn at university the best practices to act and defend themselves in this area.
Information is one of the most important assets of any organization, regardless of its size or area of activity.
Training resources, papers and dissertations, practices, administration documents, research results, etc., are examples of information that we must protect in our universities.
As with any communication tool, it is necessary to define its correct and safe use, since, in addition to misuse and inadvertent errors, email has become one of the most used means by cybercriminals to perpetrate their attacks.
It is common to receive spam, phishing-type messages or messages from fake entities or people in your inboxes. In these cases, they use social engineering techniques to achieve their malicious purposes, for example infecting the equipment or even the entire university network, as well as stealing access data, banking data or confidential information.
In a malicious email message, the sender, subject line, body text, attachments or hyperlinks may be designed to mislead the recipient of the message.
In your daily study or work, you need to access various services, devices and applications using a double element: username and password.
Ensuring the security of this dual element is imperative for the university, and the first security measure to take is to use secure passwords.
The workstation or study station is the place where we perform our daily tasks at the university. As part of these daily activities, every user has to access different systems and handle different types of information.
Consequently, we must take into account that the workstation is critical from an information security point of view.
The use of personal devices belonging to university workers, whether administrative and service employees, faculty or researchers, to fulfill professional tasks is called BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
Social networks are a very important tool for society and also, consequently, for the university community.
Through social networks, students, teachers, researchers or administration and services staff can make contacts, share opinions, studies, projects, events, etc., of their personal and professional life.