Privacy Awareness week – what staff need to know
Earlier this month it was revealed that Facebook suffered another data breach, only this time a massive one, leading to private information from 533 million accounts being leaked online. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s private credentials were included in the data set that was made available on the dark web. Data breaches have become alarmingly frequent.
How do you safeguard your data? Do you know where it is?
Many of our activities online request us to provide varying degrees of personal detail – we should take this a little more seriously. Maybe, instead of just giving everyone what they ask for, we should deal with data the same way we deal with money – to set limits on how much we are willing to share or spend. Are you sending the “money” to the correct recipient? Are you spending more than you want? Is this someone that you should do business with?
Food for thought, but these are nevertheless questions that we need to ask ourselves if we want to start treating our data as the valuable resource that it is.
3rd – 9th May marks Privacy Awareness Week with the theme Make Privacy a Priority.
Actions you can take to protect privacy.
Like most other things in life, taking action to protect your data privacy will not require you to make drastic changes. Just start small and repeat. You may already be undertaking a range of data protection activities like setting boundaries to how much data you are willing to share online and sticking with it!
Sharing. Sensitivity. Settings.
Most of our day-to-day communication is via email. To help keep your Deakin email protected, consider putting into action the following email best practices (3 minutes read time).
We have seen potential data breaches commonly start as a simple case of accidentally sending an email with sensitive information to unintended recipients or applying incorrect file-sharing settings. Sensitivity labels are available to help you securely share sensitive Microsoft documents.
Staff will now be notified of overshared files to manage the risk of data breaches. The notification will request you take action to confirm that the shared item has the correct authorised recipients. If no action is taken, the item will be made private 30 days after receiving the alert. Be sure to check the permissions on your shared documents.
Not sure what privacy basics you can put in place?
Join us to mark Privacy Awareness Week. Together with the Office of General Counsel, we will be hosting the next Cyber Security Session at 2 pm on Thursday 6th May 2021. In this session, we will help you to put in place easy privacy and security habits.
Stay tuned to the Cyber Security Blog and Cyber Life on Yammer for the latest alerts and tips.
William Confalonieri
Chief Digital Officer
Deakin University