Cyber Security Awareness Month

Are you looking for more ways to educate and enforce good security habits in your business? October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), which provides an opportunity to hone in on important security best practices that can save you from threats like business downtime and money loss. This month is all about staying safe and pulling together as a team!

Are you ready to celebrate security? Not many businesses are – which is why they work with us! Here at InnoTek, we approach all facets of IT with the same degree of commitment and care. We have provided businesses throughout Pennsylvania with a more secure and quality IT experience! Call today, and we’ll get started!

What is Cyber Security Awareness Month?

In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance came together to reinforce and emphasize the growing importance of cybersecurity to the nation. National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) resulted from this cooperation, and October has been the time of year when hundreds of groups and companies redouble their efforts to educate and teach their people the importance of cyber security.

For quite some time now, the month of October has been a time to emphasize our shared responsibility to keep our networks safe from outside threats. The official stance of NCSAM has been to give every week of the month a different theme, with an overarching theme of “Secure Our World.” So what can we do to do our part?

How Can You Reinforce the Importance of Cyber Security?

A pair of IT experts working in an office and looking at a pair of screens

While it can feel overtly ‘corporate’ or cause your employees to roll their eyes, enforcing education and care for security can be invaluable in protecting your business. Cybersecurity education is one of the best ways to ward off phishing and would-be hackers – but how do you engage people?

Make it an Event

Make weekly lunch meetings or webinars to cover different topics throughout the month of October. You can theme each webinar on a different security aspect, like recognizing phishing or multi-factor authentication. Even if you don’t require attendance, many people will simply attend an event if you put it on their calendar.

Use Strong Visuals

Visual reinforcement is a major tool in learning and shouldn’t be neglected during your National Cyber Security Month planning. Finding graphics and presentations online and sharing them with your team can be a simple way to provide additional ‘at-a-glance’ opportunities to learn about how to protect data from trojan horses and viruses.

Make it a Game

Lectures can often be boring or disengaging, but everyone loves trivia! Maybe you can share information on some topics over the month, culminating in a trivia event that would pull from each of your topics. If you have a particularly competitive team, putting a small prize on the line can push your team to learn and pay more attention to topics relating to threats and vulnerabilities.

Hack Your Own Business

A core practice of cybersecurity professionals is to regularly run fake phishing campaigns and poke or prod at a business’s potential weak points. While these kinds of campaigns should already be a part of your cybersecurity practices, you can add in other methods of social engineering and hacking attempts – buy a handful of new and unused USB sticks and fill them with key learning points and files detailing risky behaviors – like putting random USB sticks in your computer! Leave these around the office and see how many sticks are still lying around at the end of the month.

Emphasize the Personal

A group of 4 IT professionals work at their own screens.

Cybersecurity is not just important in the office. Our personally identifying information is constantly under threat of thieves and criminals. Make your education personal by showcasing how you can use your information and cybersecurity awareness at home. Staying safe online is important across all of our lives.

Critically: Make it Fun

Focusing on the fear of losing money or having your identity stolen can be a downer – so emphasize the importance of safety with a little bit of fun! Use a bit of humor and entertainment to catch people’s attention and cut through the boredom of a ‘lecture’ on security. It can get exhausting when the security advice is focused on dour and dark potential – simply including a few gifs of ridiculous 80’s-style hacking can provide much-needed levity.

Celebrate Security with InnoTek!

Getting people excited for something like learning about workplace security isn’t easy, but the importance of cybersecurity awareness can’t be overstated! Your defenses need to be at their absolute best today, which takes everybody pitching in and getting on the same page. Get everyone organized with quality time and National Cyber Security Awareness Month!

If you have questions or thoughts on how to make this NCSAM the best yet, talk to us! We are experts on all things cybersecurity and can be your best resource for more information, techniques, and strategies. Don’t hesitate to experience a safer business!

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