Personal Identifiable Information (PII)

  • PII is information that can be used to identify a user. PII can be made up of a variety of different kinds of data, including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, bank codes, and more. PII can also include information about a person’s health, locaiton, etc. In our projects we used a database in order to store user data. This data can be seen as PII. We have also seen personal information when signing up for services that we use such as accounts for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc, which store emails, phone numbers, often address and other information while setting up the tools that we use to create our projects.

Feeling PII & Personal Exposure

I believe that PII is necessary for user data and accounts, amd is one of the few ways that users can be validated.

Good Vs. Bad Password

A good password is one that is random and hard to guess. They often times are not things like birthdays, or names, as they could be socially engineered and cracked. Good passwords are also full of random, complex, and full of random obscure symbols. This makes it hard for hackers to brute force guess your password. Also, it’s good to have different passwords for different websites.

Symmetric & Asymmetric Encryption

Symmetric encryption is a type of encryption where the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the data. This is the most common type of encryption, as it is used for most password encryption systems. This means that there is a faster encryption and decryption process as the same key is used for both. Example Symmetric Encryption: AES, DES, 3DES, etc.

Asymmetric encryption is a type of encryption where there are two distinct keys, a public and private key. The public key is used to encrypt the data and the private key is used to decrypt the data. This is the type of encryption that we used for our GitHub fastpages blog. Example Asymmetric Encryption: RSA, ECC, etc.

AWS Deployment

We used private and public SSH keys while deploying our project to AWS. We also created a .pem file that we used to look into our instance. We didn’t do much else in terms of encryption after that, as anything else was for hte most part, beyond us.

How I got Phished

When I was 5, I was contacted by a ‘Nigerian Prince’ via email. He said that I won 50,000 dollars! I was so hyped because I thought it was real. One catch however, I needed to pay the shipping fee of $50, makes sense because he was from Nigeria, or at least I thought. I took my dad’s credit card and I payed up, not knowing it was a scam. He never replied after he got the money, and I obviously didn’t get my ‘prize’. Once my dad found out, lets just say I didn’t get any birthday presents that year…