October has been recognized as Cybersecurity Awareness Month since 2004. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity alliance (NCA) facilitate a partnership between government and industry to raise national cybersecurity awareness.
The 2022 theme for Cybersecurity Awareness Month is “See Yourself in Cyber.” This theme focuses on the “people” part of cybersecurity and the organizations provide information and resources to help educate the public to make smart decisions relating to cyber security.
The outreach encourages individuals and families to enable basic cyber hygiene practices including updating software, thinking before clicking and keeping strong passwords.
CISA and NCA encourage all individuals to take the following 4 key action steps.
- Think Before You Click: Recognize and Report Phishing: If a link looks a little off, think before you click. It could be an attempt to get sensitive information or install malware.
- Update Your Software: If you see a software update notification, act promptly. Better yet, turn on automatic updates.
- Use Strong Passwords: Use passwords that are long, unique, and randomly generated. Use password managers to generate and remember different, complex passwords for each of your accounts. A passwords manager will encrypt passwords securing them for you.
- Enable Multi-Factor Authentication: You need more than a password to protect your online accounts, and enabling MFA makes you significantly less likely to get hacked.
A Cybersecurity Awareness Month presentation may be accessed by clicking here.
