Security breeches are always happening. Hackers use many different skills to attempt to gain access to files which are not supposed to be seen by them. Some hackers just do it for fun, while others have a more malicious intent. My tutors always told me that nothing is unhackable – so if someone is determined and skilled enough they will eventually gain access to a system and its data – unless of course they are caught while trying to do this but this is unlikely. So with this in mind, how can we help protect our data?

Staff training is important, this is because some people may use social engineering techniques to learn information which can help them gain access to the system . It is important that staff members realise this and ensure that they do not give out their username or password to anybody (including friends and colleges) even if they think they are able to trust those people.

It is also important that staff members are able to identify suspicious behaviour and know who it must be reported to in order to ensure that there is no ill intent being carried out.

When choosing a password the password chosen must be difficult to guess as this will make it harder for anyone to access the system using their account. The BBC published an article after it was found that the company Adobe was hacked and showed that the top passwords used were easy to guess passwords. The most popular password was 123456 which 1.9 million (out of 150 million accounts) people chose to use on their account. This is an example of a weak password, it is easy to guess, many people who were guessing a password would probably guess this (along with the phrase “password”). A password should be easy to remember but at the same time hard to guess.

For example someone who likes Formula 1 may choose a password based on a Formula 1 track. S1lv3rst0n3 could be used instead of the word silverstone. What I have done here is simply replaced all of the vowels in the word Silverstone with a number which looks simmilar to the vowel and used a capital letter at the start. Another variation could be to use S!lv3r$t0n3 which would replace the letter i with a ! and the second s with the $. These would be harder passwords to guess in comparison to just the word silverstone (all lowercase).