There are four key pillars to keeping your account and our students data safe.

1. Strong Passwords:

   1. A minimum of 10 characters is okay, but we really suggest using a passphrase instead of a single password. Something like Fuzzy-Goat-Hare1 increases the difficulty for brute force password cracking attempts exponentially over a single password of 10 characters.

   2. While some organizations will still make you change your password periodically, this has been shown to reduce overall security as it leads to password reuse or even worse, passwords being written down…

   3. One Site/Service one password. Do not reuse passwords. While we sync passwords here at silo between Clever/Google/Microsoft, for all other sites it is best to have a unique password for each site or service.

   4. Use a password manager. Keep these unique passwords in a password manager, not only do most support syncing of passwords to all of your devices, but it also allows you to only need to remember one really strong passphrase or use Face ID to access the rest of your saved passwords.

2. MFA – Multi-factor Authentication:

   1. Passwords are not enough, that’s why we enforce MFA here at silo. Doing this on your Social Media, personal email accounts, and other sites and services that allow it will help prevent unauthorized access to your accounts.

3. Update your systems:

   1. Don’t ignore system updates on your phone, laptop, work computer, etc. These are not always critical in nature, but they are always important and usually are closing lots of discovered system vulnerabilities and exploits.

   2. Secure your personal devices with a minimum of a pin or pass-code to prevent unauthorized account access if your device is lost or stolen.

4. Stay Vigilant with your Email Inbox:

   1. Most cyber attacks begin with a little social engineering, a phishing email or even worse a spear phishing email crafted specifically for you to try to get your to complete a form or click a link to attempt to exploit an un-patched vulnerability in your device or browser to gain a toe hold on your machine or steal your account credentials.

   2. We offer training and reporting via the CyberNut platform integrated into your gmail.com inbox. If you see something suspicious please use the CyberNut tool to report it for further analysis.

As always we are doing our best to keep you and your data safe by keeping our systems up to date, monitoring suspicious and malicious network traffic, and enforcing best practice security policies. If you have any questions or concerns we are always happy to help, just email helpdesk@siloisd.org