Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2024

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an international initiative to educate about online safety to protect data from cybercrime. Founded in 2004, Cybersecurity Awareness Month, held each October, is the world’s foremost initiative aimed at promoting cybersecurity awareness and best practices.

The theme of this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month is Secure Our World, which encourages all of us to take four easy steps each day to ensure our online safety:

• Use strong passwords and a password manager, when able – Simple passwords can be guessed. Make passwords at least 16 characters long, random and unique for each account. Use a password manager, a secure program that maintains and creates passwords. This easy-to-use program will store passwords and can often fill them in automatically on the web. Learn more >
• Turn on multifactor authentication (MFA) on personal devices and business networks – Use MFA on any site that offers it. MFA provides an extra layer of security in addition to a password when logging into accounts and apps, like a face scan, or a code sent by text. Using MFA will make you less likely to get hacked.
• Recognize and report phishing – Most successful online intrusions result from a recipient of a “phishing” message accidentally downloading malware or giving their personal information to a spammer. Do not click or engage with these phishing attempts. Instead, recognize them by their use of alarming language or offers that are too good to be true. Report the phish and delete phishing messages.
• Install updates on a regular basis and turn on automated updates – When devices, apps or software programs (especially antivirus software) notify us that updates are available, we should install them as soon as possible. Updates close security code bugs to better protect our data.

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