Cybersecurity Essentials: How to Stay Protected in Cyber World

Reflection Report

Cybersecurity Essentials: How to Stay Protected in Cyber World

Details of the event/activity 

The webinar I attended online was titled “Cybersecurity Essentials: How to Stay Protected in Cyber World”, where it focuses on how to protect ourselves while surfing on the cyber space. It was held on Saturday, September 25, 2021, at 4 PM (GMT-8). The webinar was organized by TechEd Global Academy Philippines with resource speaker Ms. Athena 'Atcha' Abe a 4th-year Computer Science student, mentor, content creator, IT Support Associate of Filta, and the Technical Community Manager of EdukasyonPH. She is an advocate for technology and social participation. Through creating content on YouTube and her speaking engagements in different universities and companies, she is able to share her knowledge and expertise with fellow students and young professionals. She aspires to be a Cyber Security Analyst someday.

Reflections the webinar/activity give rise to (learnings)  

I learned many things during this webinar about Cyber Security. Being a Computer Science student like our speaker, I already have gained some of the basic knowledge on how we can have better security and awareness online, but during this webinar, things were refreshed to me and I learned so much more. Ms. Atcha taught us how our personal data vulnerable online. Having a long and complicated account password would be less to be exploited by hackers because having a weak and dictionary available password could be a subject for brute attacks. Another is that we should reuse our password from different accounts and also changing our password from time to time would be highly suggested in order to establish a secured account. She also discussed with the participation of the audience what are the different ways a hacker could take over your data, like for example, social engineering attacks. Where the cybercriminals will try to manipulate you in order to get the confidential information that can be used against you. Another way is phishing, she taught that this attack is the most common and widely used for hacking. To me, I’ve been wary of this because on Facebook I have seen many of this where some people are sending messages or sharing posts that contain sketchy links and improper images. Unfortunately, many have been fallen into victims because of this, to the extent that they can no longer access their account as the cyber criminals took it.

The memorable part of this webinar is that some of the questions she asks make me guilty, particularly on the password usage as she recommends to you use unique passwords because sometimes, I find it hard to use different passwords as I have many accounts using on different websites.

Reflections on possibilities on implementing some of the webinar input on a practical level (practical application of learnings)

With this new and refreshed idea, I will try to implement that knowledge to my current and future accounts in order to prevent unfortunate things that could happen online with our accounts and make way for a better surfing. Also, I will try to share this idea to others who are not very knowledgeable the risks we have to protect them and their personal data.

Positive feedback (on the event organization)

The speaker and organizer are very engaging to the audience as they talk, they will try to interact by asking for ideas as they collaborate about the topic they discuss. Ms. Atcha was also very open for the questions to answer with best of her abilities

Suggestions for improvements to be made/ consider for future activities

The webinar was a success and very informative for me, my only suggestions is that I hope that for future webinars they should notify us like providing an email so that we can participate again.

Photos/Videos taken