Personal and Professional Data Security for Higher Education Faculty

During the month of March I look forward to hosting two sessions specifically designed to help college faculty and staff secure their digital lives.   Similar sessions are available on your campus.  Contact christopher@vanoosterhout.com for details.

Session description:

As we continue to digitize more and more of our lives we end up leaving digital footprints across cyberspace. These digital footprints contain important and valuable information that you need to protect. Both legitimate businesses and unscrupulous criminals have intentions on our data and it is being collected, stored and analyzed in amazing ways.

Within the last few months large companies like Adobe, Neiman Marcus, Coca-Cola, Target and others have suffered security breaches releasing tens of millions of personal data records. Just this past month Yahoo! announced that they to had also been victimized by hackers. Then there are the concerns about the security of people entering very personal data into a web site like healthcare.gov

In this session we will tackle some of the myths of data security as well as examine some of the very real risks of using online services. You will leave the session with a better understanding of how to evaluate the risks and protect yourself. The session will also provide you with ideas about tools for better managing your passwords in a secure way. We will cover the content in a way that will be applicable to both your personal life as well as the way you teach.  Whether you use a little technology or a lot of technology in your teaching methods this session will provide you with tools to better protect you, your students and your institution.