Human Factor Tops for Cyber Dangers: UCI Dean

By Kevin Costelloe, Orange County Business Journal

For UCI Dean Marios Papaefthymiou, giving up your privacy is just a click away.

“We all go and we click on the boxes and we agree with who knows what. And before we know it, our data is basically up for grabs,” he told the Business Journal on Aug. 19.

Papaefthymiou is the dean of the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences at UCI, giving him a front-row seat for developments in the cyberworld.

Papaefthymiou has an in-depth knowledge of how technology works. He holds 21 US and international patents on energy-efficient computing and is co-founder and chief scientist of Cyclos Semiconductor, a Michigan spin-off commercializing energy-efficiency solutions for high-end computers.

In 2017, he became the dean of the school that now has more than 3,600 undergraduate students, 400 doctoral students and postdocs, 600 research and professional master’s students and 100 faculty representing 3 departments — Computer Science, Informatics and Statistics.

With daily news reports about hacking and constant threats, what is the biggest risk in cybersecurity?

“It’s the human factor, by all means the human factor,” he said.

“By far, the most effective attacks are the ones that basically do some kind of phishing campaign. And you get humans to buy into that and give out passwords or click on links that take them to ransomware.”

The second biggest risk involves not keeping computer anti-virus protections and other defenses up to date. “The probability of an up-to-date system being hacked is much, much lower,” he says.

“The systems that fall behind in terms of their updating, they are the pens that are targeted.”

This article has been edited for clarity and brevity. Read the original full article in the Orange County Business Journal (subscription required).