Digital Self-Defense
Digital Self-Defense can help you improve your digital security and better protect yourself online. Cybercrime not only affects you, it affects everyone around you.
We've pulled together our best tips to help you learn about cyber threats and how your online behavior can make you safer!
The VPN, Virtual Private Network, creates a secure connection to the campus network, allowing you to access campus resources while working remotely.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a critical component of a secure IT environment that enables you to verify your identity using your phone or other personal device and prevents unauthorized users from logging into your account, even if they know your password.
Your password should be at least 8 characters, but making it even longer is more secure. You should change your password at least once a year.
For help generating strong passwords, LastPass is available as an OU benefit for all faculty, staff, and students.
A password manager/vault helps store, create, and manage passwords.
- Employees are provided free anti-virus through Dell Data Protection & Endpoint Security (DDPE) on University owned devices.
- Students are recommended, by OU IT, to have an antivirus and malware scanner active on their personal computers.
- Free Downloads
Keep your machine updated with current security patches. Check regularly for updates to third party applications such as Adobe, Flash, Java, etc. Automatic updates offered by Windows and Macs do not always patch these applications. Where possible, turn on automatic updates to apply operating system security updates.
- Check web browser and plugins.
- Update your browser.
- Disable browser plugins.
- Uninstall unnecessary software and services.
- If you are unfamiliar with a program, visit needhelp.ou.edu to chat with our IT Services team before you uninstall it. There are some programs that need to run natively on your machine.
- Disable Pop-up Windows
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
- Edge- enabled by default, but you can learn how to disable it.
Outlook for Office 365 is our most recent Mail Client and is the only client that has the Phish Alert Button installed for reporting threats to the cybersecurity team.
- Instructions to Block Spam
- Ongoing feedback from users in the junk email classification program helps ensure that spam technologies are continually trained and improved.
- Instructions to Sort "Clutter
- "Clutter" can help you filter low-priority emails.
