Have you ever wondered how you, or anyone, could have hacked a Grindr account? Or how ransomware attacks on hospitals are becoming homicides? Perhaps you’ve even wanted to see how simple it is to “thought-hack” a U.S. presidential election. All these topics and more are brought to light in Anthony Bruno’s newly-founded newsletter called Bite-Sized Bits.
Bruno is a current junior at Stevens pursuing his Bachelors in Cybersecurity. He is also the vice president of DuckHacks, a Stevens hackathon committee. This past summer, DuckHacks managed to run a successful virtual hackathon in support of the Black Lives Matter movement amidst the ongoing pandemic.
From his experience as the vice president of DuckHacks, Bruno learned how much he values sharing his knowledge and educating others. With this goal in mind, he created a bi-weekly cybersecurity newsletter called “Bite-Sized Bits” for non-highly technical readers. His hopes in writing to the general public are to raise awareness around cybersecurity, help the public protect themselves virtually, and educate people to the point where they can teach others.
Despite only being live a month, Bruno’s initiative has already found significant success. “I’m surprised with the amount of readers and engagement already. I can only hope to continue to educate people and provide entertaining content,” he expressed.
Bruno has no plans to stop either. He has been working hard to grow his audience, with six entries already posted to his bulletin.
One concept Bruno emphasizes in his newsletter is the importance of ensuring your virtual privacy as technology induces globalization. The number of malware attacks seeking to compromise data on universities, companies, or hospitals continues to climb every day.
In one of his early articles, Bruno discussed how the Duesseldorf University Hospital in Germany accidentally became the target of a ransomware attack, which was originally meant for the university itself.
During the server downtime, hospital staff were kept out of the network, rendering them unable to access patient data and admit new patients. Before the hospital could recover, a woman in an ambulance in critical condition, who needed medical attention immediately, was redirected to a hospital further away and the delay meant she could not receive help in time.
Bruno stressed the implications of this story, mentioning that “hospitals are big targets right now and it’s really dangerous. It’s just one example of me trying to inform people of the importance of cyber security, as it has real consequences. It’s becoming life and death.”
Bruno wanted readers of The Stute to leave with a simple, but important, takeaway of how they can better secure themselves on the web amongst an ever-growing amount of phishing attacks. “Always double-check the link in the address bar when you are logging into a website. Phishers spend a lot of time creating identical log-in screens, but these pages can’t replicate the link to the website they are imitating. If you have any doubts about a link, look-up the website and log-in directly.”
Be First to Comment