Cybersecurity fall refresh

Move-in day is behind us, syllabi are set, and the faculty, staff and students have settled in for the new school year. Before the semester picks up speed, take five minutes for a habit refresh that will protect you all year. Unlike your gen-ed requirements, good cybersecurity habits never graduate. They just come back around every fall, a little more important than the year before.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Visit the Purdue Cybersecurity Awareness website for information on this year's scheduled events. 

Multifactor authentication: Still your best defense

If one habit deserves a victory lap, it's multi-factor authentication. A stolen or guessed password alone can no longer get an attacker into your account with using Purdue MFA. Phones get replaced, numbers change, and old devices linger in approval lists long after they should. Take sixty seconds this week to open your MFA settings and confirm the device listed is the one in your pocket right now.

MFA doesn't just slow attackers down — for most account-takeover attempts, it stops them cold.

Let a password manager do the remembering

Every semester, someone's favorite password shows up in a data breach dump from a site that has nothing to do with Purdue — and if that password is reused anywhere on campus systems, the breach follows them here. A password manager generates a long, unique password for every account and remembers it, so you don't have to. It's the single biggest upgrade you can make to your personal security in under fifteen minutes.

Spot it before you click it

Phishing emails are the front door for most of the incident’s PSS responds to, and this fall semester is no different. There are many unfamiliar sign-up forms, professor piano offers, fake student internship opportunities, and Windows credential issues — indeed prime hunting season. Before you click, take three seconds to check: does the sender's email address match who they claim to be? Is it demanding an action urgently? Does the link, when you hover over it, go where the text says it should? If anything feels off, don't click — report it instead. A single forwarded suspicious email can help PSS block a scam before it reaches hundreds of other inboxes.