Security Matters

Data Privacy Day is celebrated worldwide every year on Jan. 28 to raise awareness about technology and privacy rights, including the importance of safeguarding our personal information. The Information Technology Services (ITS) division is leading a Data Privacy Day 2022 campaign to raise awareness and educate the University of Toronto (U of T) tri-campus community ...

The University of Toronto (U of T) has partnered with Canadian Internet Registration Authority and ORION to pilot a Information Security Awareness Training platform for delivering information security awareness courses. “The Information Security Awareness Training pilot is part of our larger efforts to build a security-aware culture across the University and equip staff, faculty and students with the knowledge needed to ...

Believing that cyber security is a shared responsibility, the University of Toronto (U of T) community celebrated another Cyber Security Awareness Month (CSAM) this October. CSAM is an internationally recognized annual campaign that aims to educate individuals and institutions about the ever-changing field of cyber security and encourage best security practices. For CSAM’s 10th anniversary, ...

The holiday season is a lucrative time for online retailers and a vulnerable time for online shoppers. As many people take advantage of holiday deals and shop online, hackers take advantage of this time of the year to steal sensitive and confidential information. With the increased number of phishing attacks in recent weeks, it’s important ...

Access to a diverse range of data from sensitive personal information to confidential research data, has made the University of Toronto (U of T) a popular target for various cyber-threats including phishing. Last week, more phishing attempts were reported as targeting the U of T community. The rising occurrence of phishing campaigns should serve as ...

Social engineering is designed to evade common security setups by targeting the people inside organizations — relying on human error as the weak link. While hackers’ approaches behind social engineering may differ in form, their goals are all very similar: identity theft, data breaches, ransomware attacks and more. Phishing, one of the most popular forms ...

The battle against phishing attacks is an ongoing, daily task. Though we are equipped with highly-sophisticated and advanced tools for protection, hackers retaliate by evolving their techniques to evade these protections. It is important to continually educate ourselves and maintain awareness about phishing attacks to ensure our individual and institutional data remains protected. Hackers use ...

The University of Toronto’s (U of T) Information Security Incident Response Plan is available to help information technology (IT) managers, non-IT unit leaders and other employees handle security incidents effectively. We interviewed three Information Security directors to ask what we need to know about the plan and how it can help you deal with security ...

Phishing has become one of the most popular subsets of social engineering. It is likely that most people have received an email urging action on an unknown link or attachment to prevent being ‘locked out of your accounts’. According to the 2021 Data breach Investigations Report (DBIR) by Verizon, 36 per cent of online breaches ...

Most of us work with data on a day-to-day basis; the data we handle range from blog posts, course material and internal reports to personal information and health records. Not all data are created equal – while press releases and blogs are meant for public consumption, personal information and health records are extremely sensitive and ...