Cyber Security Awareness Month - October 2023
This year is the 20th anniversary of Cyber Security Awareness Month. It runs every October and is an opportunity for companies to highlight the importance of security to their business operations and their customers. It can be a dedicated month for talking about risks faced by your organisation; a chance to inject some fun into your security program; or an opportunity to raise the visibility of your commitment to protecting your customers from data breaches.
What's this year's theme?
This year the US-based Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has set four topics for Cyber Security Awareness Month, these are:
Use strong passwords and password managers
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recommends using strong passwords to protect your systems and information.
The NCSC’s guidance suggests using ThreeRandomWords to create passwords.
It is no longer recommended to mandate upper and lower case, a number, and a special character or to change the password regularly (i.e., every 30, 60, 90 days).
Turn on multi-factor authentication
Multi-factor authentication provides an extra layer of defence against attackers looking to access your systems and steal your information.
Multi-factor authentication comes in many forms:
1) a text message or call to a registered phone number
2) an authenticator app
3) a physical token
Recognise and report phishing
Phishing is still one of the most widely used method of attacking companies. Whether it is to gain access, steal your data or deploy ransomware, attackers send out millions of these emails every year hoping that someone will click on or interact with the email and its contents.
You can get more specific phishing attacks called ‘Whaling’ and ‘Spear phishing’ that target specific users in your company (i.e., CEO, CFO)
Update software
Unpatched or out-of-date software can lead to attackers gaining access to your systems, information, customers, and money.
Companies are regularly breached through the use of out-of-date and unsupported software. Two recent UK examples are the Electoral Commission and a defence contractor, both of whom had sensitive information stolen and have spent a lot of time trying to resolve and recover.
Have you created a CSAM 2023 program?
If so, that’s great – we look forward to hearing about what companies have been doing during the month.
If not, now is the perfect time to start thinking about it! It can be difficult to come up with ideas, or you might not have enough time or resources to dedicated to developing a program and all the content to get the most out of it. If that’s the case, let us help.
Our team of cyber security and education professionals are ready to help you achieve the most from CSAM 2023. We can create an events schedule, develop dedicated and organisation-specific content to help you achieve your goals, and even manage and deliver a whole month’s worth of content to your users.