By Fethi Benaissa

Phil Taylor, a networks and security engineer at Palo Alto Networks, has delivered a lecture on cyber-security this morning at UWS campus in Ayr.

Mr Taylor was invited to speak to the data journalism students. Afterwards he spoke exclusively to a group of Broadcast Journalism students who came to learn more about how to protect their online activity.

Palo Alto Networks is an American multinational cyber-security company based in Santa Clara, California. It provides advanced firewalls and other cyber-security services to organisations in more than 150 countries. The company hosts the Ignite cyber-security conferences in the US and Europe as part of its “mission to protect our way of life in the digital age by preventing successful cyber-attacks”

In an interview with our reporter Heather Ryce, Phil Taylor highlighted the main things that people need to watch out for to protect themselves from hackers: “Password security … make sure you have different passwords across all your different systems. Use a password manager and 2FA”

He also recommended paying more attention to spam emails and unknown social media profiles: “I don’t click on links from emails when I don’t know who it’s from. I don’t share my details with other people. And ultimately it’s just about a lot of common sense … don’t connect with people in social media that you don’t know”

Taylor was later joined by Steven Wallace, an account manager at FullProxy. Watch our report bellow for more information about cyber-security and how to stay safe online.