Modern society is rapidly embracing ever-improving technologies and adopting digital solutions in everyday life. While this has significantly improved productivity, communication and quality of life, it has also given every digitally enabled user an undesirable distinction: a unique personal cyber risk profile. Most technology users are at least peripherally aware of this new peril, but how many of us actively understand and manage our personal cyber risk?
Everyone’s personal cyber risk profile is different. Even within the same household, a teenager firmly entrenched in an online gaming community has a distinct cyber risk profile compared with their more conservative parents. Assessing an individual’s risk is challenging because it relies on factors such as cyber awareness, knowledge and experience.
These factors meaningfully affect how we behave in cyberspace, and those behaviours directly shape our risk profile. The scale and speed of technological innovation can be overwhelming, particularly for less digitally enabled and vulnerable people. Unfortunately, cyberspace is impartial to an individual’s status or capability: susceptible users are targeted just as much as IT specialists.
Adopting proactive cyber strategies is imperative to maintain a healthy digital persona. Risk reduction need not be difficult. Using multi-factor authentication, choosing pseudonyms in online communities and never sharing personal or sensitive data unless it is encrypted can all meaningfully improve your personal cyber risk profile.
It is never too late to start. The question is not whether a cyber incident will affect you, but when.
Written by
Graciela Corral de Zubielqui
