Cybersecurity for startup political organizations and news outlets
It is easy to underestimate your vulnerability…until it’s too late.
Originally published on outsmartbigbrother.com
The problem
Websites get hack attacked.
Websites that are political or journalistic in nature are at an increased risk of being hacked, since not only do they attract the “regular” attackers, but they are a more likely target for ideologically-driven attackers as well. Hackers can be literally anyone.
Organizations on all sides of the political spectrum can be targeted.
Gab, a social media platform dominated by the Right and Alt-Right, was targeted, and so was Liker, which appears to be a more Leftist social media platform, especially when they characterized their own hack incident as being a politically-motivated attack by “Trumpers”.
A thought experiment:
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you are a startup political activism organization that relies heavily on your resources connected to the Internet (like a website, databases, communication channels, social media, banking, etc.).
Let’s also assume you ideologically align with position “A”.
There are bound to be computer-savvy individuals somewhere who align with other positions that conflict with position “A”. If those individuals also are willing to hack attack you based on that difference of beliefs, then you are a natural target.
These attackers could be citizens of your own country, or another country. They could be private individuals acting out of their own animosity, or they could be government officials attacking to achieve some political goal.
Regardless of where the attacker comes from, they can deal a whole lot of damage to your organization if they are both motivated and able to find a way to do so. Imagine an attacker hacking into your one of your employees’ poorly-passworded email accounts and sending fraudulent emails to all your donors, asking them for money, when in reality it is a scam. When your donors read the emails, they will see that it comes from a legitimate email address. So the donors click on the link in the email, which takes them to a page that looks practically identical to your own fundraising site. The attacker’s fraudulent site accepts your donors’ payment information, withdraws money from their accounts, and makes them think that it was all legitimate.
Imagine that the attacker also hacks into your admin account for the website, and puts malware into your website so that when visitors think they are getting one thing, they end up with their computer becoming useless and acting as a carrier of self-replicating malware that tries to spread itself like a disease to other computers.
Imagine the attacker not only wants to plunder you, but also wants to shame you as well. They hack into your (again) poorly-passworded official social media accounts and change all the email and phone number settings, then start posting propaganda that goes directly against what your organization stands for. Your followers start “unfollowing” you en masse and comment how disappointed they are with your organization. It’s a public relations mess!
Finally, the attackers encrypt all your organization’s data and demand a ransom for it, but never actually decrypt it for you, even if you pay up.
You want to hire a security firm to “clean things up” for you, but you don’t have enough funds and your donors have just been milked for all they have to spare.
Needless to say, that would be a mess.
It would also be a preventable mess. While there is no way to guarantee that all cyberattacks will fail, you can stack the deck in your favor by following some basic cybersecurity best-practices.
The solutions
Here are some of the things that I consider most important:
Passwords Passphrases
“Shift your thinking from passwords to passphrases.”
While all elements of cybersecurity can be important, passphrases are probably the single most important category. Keep your password only to yourself. If you have a collaborator, add an account for them, but never share your passwords.
Brute forcing a password (using a computer to guess it), and/or guessing a password based on a user’s personal life, can be extremely easy for those hackers who know what they are doing.
Before you read the following passphrase tips, please understand that there are plenty of password managers to help you out. Most modern browsers like Brave already have a password manager built-in.
Use math to your advantage
In order to beat the attackers at the password-guessing-game, you must recognize the power of almighty math.
If you were to pick a single lowercase letter (and I knew it was a single lowercase letter), then it would take me a maximum of 26 attempts before I would correctly guess it. This is because there is only one character and it is limited to only one type of character — the lowercase English alphabet. The probability of me guessing your letter correctly the first time (assuming I eliminate each possibility after it proves to be incorrect), can be represented mathematically as 1/26.
However, if you were to now pick two lowercase letters (and I knew they were two lowercase letters), then I would not have 1/26 chance of guessing it the first time, but rather 1/(26*26), which equals 1/676.
Likewise, if you were to pick two characters, but this time were to have the characters be either lowercase letters OR digits OR a combination of them, I would be forced to assume that either character could be either type. Thus, my likelihood of guessing on the first try would not be 1/(26*26) or 1/676, but rather 1/(36*36), which equals 1/1296.
Do you notice what is happening? As the quantity and diversity of the characters INCREASES, the likelihood of me guessing correctly DECREASES. With each additional character, the added security is not simply linear, but exponential.
However, since hackers can use computers to automate their guessing, our passphrases must be longer than what we would reasonably expect them AND their computers to be able to guess.
The longer your passwords, the better. Go for around 17+ characters, but understand that — as technology progresses — it will become easier for attackers to overcome longer passwords.
Use a diverse range of character types, including lowercase letters (“abcd”), uppercase letters (“ABCD”), digits (“1234”), and special characters (“!@#$”).
Do not use the same password across multiple platforms. This prevents an attacker from gaining instant access to multiple areas of your online life in the event they are able to successfully crack one of your passwords. When you get attacked, you want the damage to be as limited as humanly possible.
Do not use words that you associate yourself with. Do not use your pet’s name, your favorite political slogan, or your mother’s maiden name in your password. Hackers can easily do reconnaissance on your social media profiles and figure out a TON of info about you. If you mention something to your friends and followers online, a hacker recognizes that you just might be using that thing in your password. Therefore, try to go for a passphrase along the lines of these:
NewbieJokerzR3picly(ool
H@tsOff2DodoTheCl0wn
EatYour404ErrorsWith$33
4BoxingBatsFight2,000FatRats
WikipediaBoomersAre30%NewAge
YoMamaTakesFiftyD@yzToFind1Gym
!!_({{symmetry|||yrtemmys}})_!!
000kn0wledge\\|\\is\\|\\flwr\\|\\pwr000
Only38.2Boulders&StonesCrushThrones
<#42>IsNEVERdaAnswr2YaProblumz
@theistPengu1nsWantPhi$h
Password examples: the longer and more complicated, the better!
Obviously, you want to be creative and come up with original passphrases. These are just some examples to hopefully inspire you.
2FA
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is basically when you are required to use not only your username and passphrase to login, but also another means of showing that the person logging-in is really you, like sending a login approval notification to your phone. This is basically a fail-safe for users having weak passwords, in my opinion, and can be very useful for preventing the impact of some human errors.
I personally have a bias against 2FA because very often 2FA systems are extremely inflexible. For example, suppose a user is required to use their phone to perform 2FA. What is that user supposed to do if they lose or break their phone? What if they change their number and forget to update their account information ahead of time? While I was in college at Andrews University, I literally resigned from my job as a writer for Student Movement (in part) because of their arbitrary 2FA requirement for all employees.
Use secure connections to the Internet
This is where a VPN can come in handy.
Also, if you are typing or receiving sensitive information (like login info, for example) make sure to always use https. The “s” means that your connection between you and the site is encrypted.
[RELATED: What is encryption and why do I need it?]
Use antivirus software
Use software to recognize and stop malware.
I personally use ClamAV, which is a free and open-source option.
Have email filters to prevent your employees’ inboxes becoming filled with spam
While no filter is bulletproof, having one in place can certainly help. Many email providers have a separate “spam” folder as the default, but check to make sure.
Having a filter helps limit the amount of phishing emails that you get.
Also, never click on email links that you just randomly see in your inbox. If you see an email from Company X that says you must log in now, open a new tab and manually type-in Company X’s domain name. See if it is legit. If anything seems phishy, talk with your IT person.
Limit permissions to only the essentials for each user
You wouldn’t give your personal credit card to a random 16-year-old. Why would you give administrator-level control over your entire website to someone who is new to the field of technology?
Don’t get me wrong: young professionals DO NEED opportunities to prove themselves, to fail, to succeed, but you don’t have to put your whole business at risk in order to achieve that opportunity for them. Give them more permissions gradually as they become more and more competent and prove themselves worthy of more of your trust.
Update/upgrade your software regularly
Often, companies update their software because they discovered a vulnerability and have now made a patch for it. If you don’t update it for your team, then you still have that vulnerability, which makes it easier for attackers to beat you.
Never reveal sensitive information
If some random person calls you asking for your date of birth, bank account info, login credentials, or anything else, DO NOT GIVE IT TO THEM, even if they seem “nice” or “legitimate.”
Back up and encrypt your data
Backing up your data helps shield you from permanent loss if something happens to your primary store of data.
Encrypting your own data helps shield you from the attackers understanding your data in the event they find it.
The human element
Hackers don’t play by the wider society’s preconceptions about what the “rules” are. Hackers try to figure out how to play by what the rules of reality are. Hacking is the guerrilla warfare of the Internet.
As humans, we often like to think of our fellow humans as being trustworthy and of goodwill. However, it is often this tendency to trust that can do the most damage to your organization.
When a hacker manipulates your employees in order to gain unauthorized access to your organization’s information, that is called social engineering. Twitter said last year that social engineering of Twitter’s employees is what led to the famous Twitter hack where several high-profile accounts appeared to post a Bitcoin scam which took an estimated $120,000 USD worth of BTC from users.
This goes to show that training your employees is super important if you care about the cybersecurity health of your organization. At the end of the day, your IT people can be stellar, but if your other employees are untrained, they remain a liability. Talk to a technical/cybersecurity professional about the possibility of them speaking to your team about this issue. Don’t just bury your head in the sand and hope you never get targeted.
If there is any context in which you should be paranoid, THIS IS IT. Cybersecurity can make or break your organization, so take it seriously.
⚛️
Description:
Link to GitHub for that mini-project:
Links for all outside content:
Video by Life-Of-Vids from Pixabay.
Music by ASHUTOSH-MUSIC from Pixabay.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
For further study:
Legal inquiries:
See OBB’s Terms of Service page:
