Today@Dal

Now that you have assessed your cyber fitness, work out your cyber security muscles with this 4-step exercise plan to keep your accounts secure. 

Step 1: Review the best recommendations for using passwords, passphrases, and PINs with all of your accounts.

Step 2: Make sure to turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for every account which supports it. 

• MFA is all about making sure that you are involved in any access of your accounts, by ensuring that something you have with you, or some characteristic unique to you is checked before someone is allowed to access your account (even if they have your password).
• MFA can prevent most kinds of account attacks from successfully gaining access to your information without your direct approval, even if a cyber criminal knows all the same things that you do about your account.

Step 3: Use Passkey on your devices.

• MFA is also the first step toward the future of account management, where we can finally get rid of passwords altogether for securing our accounts. Passwordless account access uses two “factors” to check your identity other than a password, such as both something you have with you, combined with a unique characteristic about you.
• Consider trying passwordless account access on your personal Google, Microsoft, and Apple accounts by creating a Passkey on your devices.

Step 4: Sign up for LastPass. 

• For those places where you still need to use a password, ensure that you are using unique and hard to guess passwords for each account by using a password manager. Dalhousie provides a free license to a LastPass subscription to all current employees, faculty, and students to help everyone manage passwords.

Whenever you have questions about managing your accounts safely, contact Dalhousie's support teams for information and expertise on protecting and securing your accounts. Always contact us if you are concerned about some inappropriate access to your Dal accounts, or have seen something strange during an account login.   

We are here to help manage the complexity of keeping your accounts secure and easy to use. Like exercise routines, steps to keep your accounts secure are not always the most fun, but our teams are here to help you plan easier ways to ensure that your cyber security fitness stays strong.