Solving a crime is like putting together a puzzle. You need to notice tiny details, but you also need to understand the bigger picture of how all the little pieces fit together. In cybercrimes, investigators need to notice tiny changes in computer code or unusual patterns in how sites are being used. Sometimes the clue …
When someone investigates a crime, they often recreate what happened. They look carefully at the crime scene and try to retrace the steps of the criminal. They look for footprints. When information moves around the internet, it leaves footprints, too. Bits of information, called data packets, take a certain route to get from your computer …
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 …
