Longwood Community,

You’ve made it to the final week of our Social Engineering Fire Up campaign! We want to take this moment to thank you for your participation. We hope you’ve learned something you can take home to your friends and family to enable a more cyber secure society.

This final week, we want to talk about your phones. Your tablets. Your smart watches. And everything in between. At Longwood, many people rely on their mobile devices to conduct business. It can either be conducted through a personal device, a work-issued device, or a combination of both. One of the simplest steps you can take to protect yourself is to secure your mobile devices

Mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives, from messaging friends, reading email, banking online, and watching movies to playing games. Today’s mobile devices are just as powerful as computers, but they’re far easier to lose or have stolen. As such, they pose some unique and additional risks. We’d like to cover key steps you can take to secure your mobile devices, including: 

  • Enabling and always using a screen lock
  • Ensuring your mobile devices are always updated
  • Safely disposing of and upgrading to a new device

For Longwood’s terms of use for smart devices, as well as some tips about securing your device, go to:  http://solomon.longwood.edu/information-security/security-awareness/device-security/protecting-your-smart-device/.

To outline some additional information, we’re also including some supplemental materials, including a mobile device factsheet and a mobile device video. We encourage you to not only review these, but to share this information with your family and friends, as these principles can be applied at both home and work. 

Remember:  Your Securing the Human training is due by October 31st. Get a jump on it now so that you can complete it before you are in the thick of the semester!  If you have any questions or if you have suggestions about how to improve our cyber security efforts, please contact Information Security, who is responsible for our security awareness program and will be happy to hear from you.

Best,

The Information Security Team