Security Awareness

This week’s topic in my MSIA course is Security Awareness. I am amazed how little awareness of security issues exists out there. This is not a sexy or exciting subject to be sure, but it has to be one of the best ROI you can have in a business. It costs very little to increase security awareness, and considering how many security violations begin with employees (> 80%), awareness is a great place to focus your efforts.

One of my classmates posted links to two sites that I think do a great job of increasing security awareness in a fun way. The first site is a game teaching people how to recognize phishing. Phishing is a tactic used by criminals to fool you into following a link to a site that takes advantage of you in one way or another such as loading malware on your computer. Please forward this link to family and friends so they can learn to avoid these scams. http://wombatsecurity.com/antiphishingphil

The other site is from the Commonwealth of Virgina, and it is a 13 minute video explaining several tactics to improve security. It presents the topic in a fun way and I actually laughed out loud a couple of times. Check it out here on YouTube. I think it is effective enough that I’m going to show it to my department in our staff meeting.

I hope these links help you improve your own security awareness and that they might help you, your family or employees learn to be more secure. I would love to hear what you or you company is doing to increase security awareness, and how effective you find it to be.

Thanks to Steven Gregory for originally posting these links.

Tagged as: increasing security, malware, phishing, security awareness, security issues, steven gregory