Since 2004, the President of the United States and Congress have declared October to be Cybersecurity Awareness Month. It’s a month when the government and private vendors of all kinds strive to help individuals and organizations protect themselves against threats to technology and confidential data. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) lead this collaborative effort.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2022 Theme: See Yourself in Cyber
This year’s theme is “See Yourself in Cyber.” It highlights that each individual has a responsibility for using cybersecurity best practices and making smart decisions whether on the job, at home or at school – now and in the future. Ecessa and JDL Technologies are pleased to support these efforts.
Why We All Need to Raise Cybersecurity Awareness
- 91% of successful data breaches start with an employee responding to a spear phishing attack
- The average cost of a ransomware attack on a business is $133,000
- 83% of SMBs are not financially prepared to recover from a cyber attack
- The cost of corporate cyber insurance premiums doubled in the past year and coverages are being reduced
What CISA and NCA Want Us to Do
For individuals and families, we encourage you to See Yourself taking action to stay safe online. That means enabling basic cyber hygiene practices: update your software, think before you click, have good strong passwords or a password keeper, and enable multi-factor authentication (meaning you need “More Than A Password!”) on all your sensitive accounts.
For those considering joining the cyber community, we encourage you to See Yourself joining the cyber workforce. We’ll be talking with leaders from across the country about how we can build a cybersecurity workforce that is bigger, more diverse and dedicated to solving the problems that will help keep the American people safe.
For our partners in industry, we encourage you to See Yourself as part of the solution. That means putting operational collaboration into practice, working together to share information in real-time, and reducing risk and build resilience from the start to protect America’s critical infrastructure and the systems that Americans rely on every day.
Here are 4 Things You Can Do
- 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: Don’t delay — 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.
Ecessa Corporation helps organizations fortify their cyber defenses and stay safe. From the next generation firewall features Ecessa integrates into each Ecessa Edge, PowerLink and WANworX product, to the security measures we follow to protect our clients’ data, to our own cybersecurity awareness training, to our strong collaboration with JDL Technologies and their focus on multi-layered cyber protection, we go the distance to keep you safe. To help you train your teams on cybersecurity awareness, we’re partnering with KnowBe4, the leading provider of cybersecurity training, to offer you free training materials. You can access your resource kit here. Please contact us to discuss your security and network needs. We’d love to work with you.