The importance of Information Security in our lives – Part 4

 

4. In our studies

The use of virtual tools increased dramatically in Peru during the Covid-19 pandemic, which made a number of educational organizations to modify the way they share knowledge to their students. There are diverse research papers published which confirmed the lack of preparation of the educational organizations as well as the available resources for their students, together with the considerable digital gap that Peru has as a country, it made a monumental negative impact which consequences could be felt in the next decades.

From the Information Security point of view, this is important due to the following points:

4.1. From the educational organization point of view

a. Students data protection

Our digital identities represent important information for the different cybernetic malicious groups. The gathering of the students’ identity could carry negative consequences like information extortion, or establish communication with the parents to extort them using their sons/daughters identities illegally. 

b. Protection of the educational organization information 

Public and private organizations hold a large amount of attractive information for illegal cybernetic groups, from the intellectual property access, organization bank account, workers bank accounts, personal details of workers and students, national organization details, identity information of all workers and students, etc. This information, if obtained illegally, could be used in negative actions that will produce mental and economic distress to the impacted people.

c. Establishment of oficial communication channels

Educational organizations should established official communication to Exchange information. Establishing these safe official channels o protocols to exchange information could make attacks like Man-in-the-middle (MIM) where communications between two points are intercepted to have access to the data being transferred or to deviate those communications to illegal servers or sites, where data will be captured to be used illegally. 

Now, due to the sudden decision to enforce lockdowns to all population, the use of free channels like Zoom or similar was the first decision to be able to continue teaching to students, but these channels are not 100% secure and should be replaced by official channels by educational organizations. In addition to that, there must be a mandatory training to use these new digital tools to all professors to avoid attacks or misconfigurations.

4.2. From the student point of view

a. Students data an identity protection

Strong passwords should be created using alphanumeric characters, special characters and capital/lower letters, of a considerable length and to be only logical or familiar to the user: another strategy is the use of phrases as passwords, which could be valid but still should be strength with the advice provided early. 

b. Student’s home network protection

We should keep in mind the mínimum requirements to protect our network at home, from the router settings modification of the internet service provider company, to use secure communication channels (ports, DNS, etc.), to have our operative systems constantly updated as well as all software packages installed in our PCs.