National Cyber Security Awareness Month Helps Get the Word Out

It’s a quirk of modern work life that, often, information and advice delivered by a third party is accepted and absorbed much more readily than the same info delivered by a plain-old colleague. It’s just more sticky, somehow, coming from outside the bubble. Organized efforts like National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) can be an opportunity to make that fact work in your favor, if your internal training and communications about cyber security policies and best practices seem to fall on deaf ears these days.

For October 2013, the 10^th anniversary of this awareness month, the theme is Our Shared Responsibility.

Interactive resources that are ready to circulate include:

Workplace Security Risk Calculator

Online Identity Risk Calculator

STOP.THINK.CONNECT. Online Safety Quiz

Other informational resources, also set to circulate, include infographics, tip sheets, glossaries and PDFs of recent security studies for SMBs and other organizations.

The list of October security conferences, webinars and other events is growing, and if you’re getting more involved, you can submit your event here, as well.

Many more free resources are offered on the NCSAM site. You can also follow @cyber and @DHSgov on Twitter for more tips and event information (unfortunately, as of this writing, these Twitter feeds are not being updated due to the federal government shutdown).

The Department of Homeland Security, one of the original sponsors of the awareness month, is coordinating five weekly targeted initiatives, highlighting mobile security, the cyber workforce, and three other topics. So far, the site seems to be functioning fully, but since some resources and events involve multiple governmental agencies, please double-check that those you are interested in have not been cancelled by the government shutdown.

This promises to be a memorable October. Let’s just hope that it is remembered for positive, as well as negative, reasons.