Jason Hong's Confabulations

A journalist asked me about cybersecurity under the Trump administration, whether anything will change. Here are my thoughts. Note that this is just my opinion and does not represent my employers or any of my funders. -------------- I don't expect much to change. President Obama already  made cybersecurity one of his top 10 priorities, and as a result, a lot of the heavy lifting has already started. However, there are still some opportunities for the  next administration . For example: A lot more research funds for longer-term thinking and solutions to big problems. Security today is dominated by the latest data breach, and there isn't enough funding for problems 5-10 years down the road, in particular Internet of Things. Another area that needs longer-term thinking and solutions is foreign countries interfering with elections . It's unclear how much happened this year, but it's only going to get worse. There are a lot of concerns that foreign countries are...

I've been asked by more and more journalists to offer some insights into various aspects of cybersecurity. I figured that since I'm already writing these up, I might as well share them with the public. This one is on ransomware. ------------------ Ransomware is a kind of malware that holds your data hostage. The malware scrambles your data and makes it so that you can't access it, unless you pay a ransom, typically in Bitcoin. It's not really clear if you can recover your data or not. Some people have been able to by paying the ransom, while others have not. Instead, the best thing you can do is to prevent being infected in the first place. Here are some tips for protecting yourself: Don't install any software you weren't expecting to install. A lot of malware and ransomware are designed to trick you into installing them. They might pretend to be anti-virus, or say that you need to update your browser. Don't do it! Be especially careful of email ...