By Juliet Aguiar DUGBARTEY
Chief Information Officer, MTN Ghana, Bernard Acquah, has cautioned Ghanaians not to share personal information with people on social media to protect themselves.
“Be careful not to share information such as address, location among others. Update your operating system on your phone regularly” he advised.
He continued that “people can take your information or identity to defraud others. You take photograph upload and add your location for people to see where you are, this is not good”.
Mr. Acquah was speaking on Bright Conversation-Cybersecurity Month by MTN on Microsoft Teams, moderated by Koby Spiky Nkrumah, Group Heat, EIB Digital/CEO ctrl.IT.
It was on the theme “Navigating the digital world safely; Awareness, Action, Assurance”.
On immediate steps to take if an individual WhatsApp or Facebook is hacked, he explained that “all you need to do is uninstall WhatApp, and then take your phone out of internet and re-install WhatApp or Face book and then put all the security setting back in place before you re-enable it; you can even change your name slightly to your nick name that people know”.
“If you have not been hacked yet, go to setting, security setting and then look for true factor authentication, privacy and be mindful on what you put out there”, he added.
According to Mr. Acquah, it is very important for the individual to use stronger or complex password and change it frequently.
“As a person you can change it every three months by mixing characters and letters. Some of the companies also change it every 30 or 50 days.
On safe way to dispose-off devises to protect your sensitive information, he said “delete everything by doing factory re-set and take all the SD memory, pen drive among others”.
Also, he advised companies to do a lot on cyber awareness; “educate your staff, do reliable updating and have access control to know what employees do on the platforms, as well as secure your end point”.
