The warning sign that you’ve been hacked might not even look like a cybersecurity problem at first. Maybe sales have plummeted on your company website, even though you usually have lots of customers. Maybe your family’s credit card suddenly isn’t being accepted at stores or restaurants. Maybe your house was broken into while you were …
Rube Goldberg’s wacky machines may be great fun to build and play with, but you wouldn’t want to be responsible for keeping one running smoothly. All those moving parts mean more for you to monitor and more places where the machine can break down. In cybersecurity, less is more. That’s another way of describing the principle …
Trying to break into a computer security system is like trying to get out of an escape room, but in reverse. When you do an escape room activity, you solve a series of puzzles in a particular order to get out. When hackers want to break into a computer, they have to get through a …
Computer programmers use a similar idea called abstraction. The goal is to remove anything on the screen that can distract you or be used incorrectly. For example, when you open a spreadsheet, you only see the columns and rows, numbers, and mathematical functions. You input your data and tell the spreadsheet to sum up columns …
Would you wear swimming flippers to go ice skating? Would you try to frost a cake before you baked it? Of course not! You use ice skates for ice skating, not swimming flippers. And you need to bake a cake before you ice it. These are examples of resource encapsulation. This cybersecurity idea labels parts …
Address space an area of the computer’s memory that only one program can access. Bar code a black-and-white code that can contain a variety of different types of data and be read by a machine. Cybersecurity the protection of digital devices, such as phones or computers, against attacks. Data packet a piece of a message (called a …
Hackers constantly look for new ways to break into other people’s computers. Cybersecurity experts have to make hacking as hard as possible. These ten principles of cybersecurity, created by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), cover different aspects of computing to make a computer system safer. Abstractionremoving any unnecessary information. …
■ Each process, or program running, is separated into its own space in the computer’s memory. You can see a form of this when you have multiple tabs open on your computer running different programs. This is called process isolation. Every program gets to work in its own space. ■ Domain separation is another way …
Imagine getting ready for school in the morning while you’re talking to your mom, packing your lunch, and trying to find your cell phone. That’s called multitasking. The problem is that our brains aren’t designed to multitask. You’re more likely to make mistakes when you multitask. Computers often have to multitask, too. When a computer …
The internet is a powerful tool! You can chat with friends, research school projects, play games, watch videos, or listen to music. The downside is that you leave information about yourself with every screen tap and click of the mouse. Some programs, like social media, allow you to share personal information, but every program or …
