By Steven Luczynski, Chief Information Security Officer, T-Rex Solutions.
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, #BeCyberSmart. For the past 16 years, DHS and the National Cybersecurity Alliance have teamed up to provide valuable methods that anyone can use to protect their data more effectively.
At T-Rex Solutions, we appreciate this effort as it helps to remind our employees, in the same manner we advise our clients, to pause and consider the importance of fundamental cybersecurity practices and the need to perform basic cyber hygiene.We are proud to be Champions supporting this work!
There are three components to this year’s overarching campaign theme: OWN IT – SECURE IT – PROTECT IT. Throughout October, I will provide my own take on these components and highlight how T-Rex employees, our most important cybersecurity assets, implement these concepts at work to ensure they are successfully protecting our corporate and customer data.
We also encourage our employees to utilize these same cyber hygiene habits at home to protect personal data for themselves and their families.
OWN IT
Our training often addresses the threat of phishing emails which could impact the security of our networks. The best phishing emails are comprised of valid information that is easily found online. Our digital footprint across social media allows a malicious actor to include key facts that make a suspicious email more convincing which increases the likelihood of a link or attachment getting clicked.
To counter this threat, we are mindful of the corporate details we post online. We also emphasize this same mindfulness to our employees, so they are aware of this type of threat before posting corporate details on their own social media, such as the name of a customer when celebrating a new contract award.
This also holds true for our employees as they consider the personal details they post online, such as an upcoming vacation that reveals when their home may be unoccupied. Protecting simple details such as these are easy ways to mitigate threats to our company and our employees.
For more information on these topics, check out:
https://staysafeonline.org/ncsam/about-ncsam/
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Social%20Media%20Guide_3.pdf
https://www.irs.gov/identity-theft-fraud-scams
https://www.trexsolutionsllc.com/what-we-do/cybersecurity/
Other articles in our Cybersecurity Awareness Month Series:
Cybersecurity Awareness Month Series: Secure IT
Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Secure IT with Passwords