Page 16 - Cybersecurity Career Guide for UT Austin

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16
Be Safe —
and Be Good
Make smart online — and IRL — decisions.
Cybersecurity, it turns out, has
as much, if not more, to do with
human behaviors and choices as
with technical defenses and safety sys-
tems. About 95 percent of all data leaks
originate with bad choices people make to
click on emails or download attachments
they should instead be deleting. The best
security systems in the world cannot
eliminate the haste, inattentiveness, and
carelessness that underlie most mis-
takes people make with online data net-
works. As you think about both your pri-
vate life on the internet as well as future
career options, reckoning with the role of
human factors in online safety is key.
Build strong passwords. The
fragility of trust online explains why
we have elaborate systems of pass-
words, encryption, and other security
measures to keep data visible and
available only to those authorized for
access. Navigating this trust-deficient
internet world means, at a minimum,
developing and managing a system for
using strong passwords.
your role in cyber