October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a global effort to help everyone stay safe and protected when using technology whenever and however you connect. The theme for the month is ‘Do Your Part, #BeCyberSmart’. The goal of this focused month-long campaign is to support online safety and educate employees, customers, and users about digital privacy. Today, BIO-key is excited to announce its commitment to Cybersecurity Awareness Month and to help organizations not only #BeCyberSmart, but be able to say #IAMCyberSmart with confidence that they are implementing the right security controls to protect themselves and their organizations.
More than ever before, technology plays a large part in everything we do. We are constantly connected to our devices and online, which has been woven into society as how people communicate and access essential information. Despite these great advances in technology, recent events like the Colonial Pipeline and JBS Meat Plant cyberattacks have shown how quickly our lives and businesses can be disrupted when cyber criminals and adversaries use technology to do harm.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month aims to shed light on security vulnerabilities while offering advice to other organizations and users on how to protect themselves and their organizations. This year, the topics and focus areas revolve around:
- Understanding and implementing basic cyber hygiene like replacing hard-to-remember passwords with strong passphrases, using multi-factor authentication and modern authentication methods, performing software updates, and backing up data.
- How to recognize a phishing attempt coming from email, text messages, or chat boxes.
- How to practice safe online behavior.
- Making cybersecurity a priority in business and how to strategize cybersecurity in your business.
We aim to participate throughout the month by providing resources around Identity and Access Management, the importance of securing your own identity, and being able to verify you are who you say you are when gaining access to applications, data, and devices. Not only do we plan to participate in promoting online safety all month, but to celebrate Identity Management week at the end of October, we also plan on releasing our own Identity Management kit to highlight issues with traditional authentication and the need for a better IAM strategies.
As a quick sneak peek, we will include quizzes to test if you are IAM-savvy, provide various resources about the tools that fall under the IAM umbrella, and share best practices for organizations to be able to say #IAMCybersmart.
If everyone ‘Does Their Part’ to implement stronger security practices and for organizations to deploy them, raise community awareness and educate their users, customers, and employees, our more technological world will be safer for everyone.
Do you want to participate in Cybersecurity Awareness Month? Visit the National Cybersecurity Alliance website to download the Cybersecurity Awareness Kit and follow us on social media for updates to our Identity Management kit which we will be releasing later in October. #DoYourPart #BeCyberSmart all month so that you too can say, #IAMCyberSmart.
