Reflective Blog #3

 "Nothing is really secure - Get over it!"

I think that this statement could be taken a number of different ways, but I am gong to assume that it is meant to tell people to not worry too much about security since everything is so insecure.

This line of thinking is pretty unsafe. Imagine if we applied the same logic to other parts of our lives. "Cars aren't safe so why bother using seat belts?" or "Racism isn't going away - get over it!". It would be a pretty sad fate for us to live out our lives not trying to make things better or improving upon our current systems.

The reality is that nothing is truly secure, true, but that does not mean we shouldn't at least try to make things secure. I'm not going to leave my house unlocked when I leave simply because someone could pick the lock anyway! Doing something as simple as making sure you password protect your WiFi network and choosing the correct security settings for network sharing could be all it takes to prevent someone from accessing your data.

I have a feeling that as wireless technology becomes more and more plastered into our culture, and as people become more tech savvy we will eventually get to the point where people understand the things we need to worry about, but until then I think it is probably a good idea to make every effort to get people to lock their networks down, put passwords or locks on their devices, use passwords that aren't simple, and whatever else they can do without it being a huge issue.

I have a laptop, smart phone, tablet, desktop pc, a wireless network at home, a wireless printer, a hard drive shared on my network, and more that I have to deal with. For me security is a concern, but it is definitely more in the back of my mind. I have passwords set on everything, I make sure that my sharing options are correct, I always put lock screens on my devices, and I try to use different passwords for everything online. I recently started using a password keeper so I could use unique passwords for all websites and not have to worry about forgetting them. Nothing too fancy, and nothing that is very inconvenient.

In the end, however, if someone much smarter than me really wanted to hack into my facebook to read my messages or steal data or get into my network and look at pictures of me hanging out with my dog (how exciting!) they probably could. That doesn't mean I won't try!