It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Know the Core Four So the Criminals Don’t Know You
In my household, the arrival of October means three things:
Time to update the whiteboard calendar on the fridge that no one else cares about.
Time to buy Halloween candy early so I can eat it all and go buy more for the kids.
It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month!
If you are not familiar, Cybersecurity Awareness Month is an annual initiative from the good folks at the National Cybersecurity Alliance.
The goal is simple: “to remind everyone that there are simple, effective ways to keep yourself safe online, protect your personal data, and ultimately help secure our world.”
Man, that last part is truly a high goal. But after years of focusing on the cybersecurity of social media, one thing is very clear to me: your personal online safety is intricately woven throughout all things you do, both online and offline. And, our individual efforts to secure our own personal security may seem small, but they actually add up to quite a lot.
This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the NCA is focusing on “the Core Four:”
Use strong passwords and (ideally) a password manager. (Serna Social recommends Keeper Security)
Turn on multifactor authentication (also known as MFA or 2FA). Even though multifactor is offered across most major websites now, a shocking number of people choose not to use it. I know the code relay thing can be annoying. But it’s a really practical and easy safety measure that can help you prevent disaster. Every day when I sit down to work, I have to log into Keeper Security, log into Facebook and log into eight other things. It sounds like a text message party for a second as the codes come rolling in. But I don’t mind at all because it makes me much safer.
Recognize and report scams. That seems obvious, but recognizing scams is getting harder thanks to AI and deepfakes. And, reporting of scams is just as important as identifying them. A shocking number of victims never report.
Update your software regularly. Or, better yet, change your device settings to update it automatically. Software updates are also annoying, but they often come with patches that improve your security and protect you against new threats.
Consider this: If you have administrator access to your company’s Facebook page or LinkedIn profile, that access is granted through your personal Facebook or LinkedIn profile. That means that if your personal account gets hacked, the criminals can then immediately access your company’s stuff. So, if you have 12 admins on your company Facebook page, and three of them use “password” as their password, your company has a pretty high risk of having its Facebook page hacked.
Now tell me that personal online security doesn’t matter.
The other thing I can say here is that even though humans generally say they know better, most of us are terrible at employing even the simplest online security measures. Just this week I was at a cell phone store signing up for service and was asked to create a personal PIN. The salesman told me it had to be six digits minimum, and then said, “I just use my birthday.” I didn’t intend to go to that store to deliver a sermon on personal online security, but you bet I did.
To further my argument, the NCA also just this week released its latest Oh Behave! Report on Cybersecurity Attitudes and Behaviors. The global survey of more than 7,000 people revealed many interesting things (I totally recommend checking it out), including:
The percentage of respondents who reported regularly creating unique and strong passwords declined from the 2024 survey and only sits at 62 percent. That means 38 percent of the people admitted they don’t employ safe password procedures.
41 percent never use a password manager, which is in my opinion, one of the key things individuals can do to really strengthen their personal security.
77 percent of respondents recognized what multifactor authentication is, but only 41 percent use it regularly. Like I said, people know better, but that doesn’t mean they take the right actions… which is what makes efforts like this so important.
So hey! It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and I highly encourage you, your family and your company to take this time to evaluate your own personal security procedures. Are you in lockstep with the Core Four? If you are interested in social media security specifically, please visit the Governance portion of my website. If you want more info on Cybersecurity Awareness Month, visit the NCA website.
I will also take the opportunity to again plug the NCA’s new booklet for educating older Americans about staying safe online, entitled “Then & Now.” As I wrote earlier on the blog, this book is truly a home run of an effort to make cybersecurity understandable and actionable for older citizens, and I totally encourage you to take a look for your own loved ones.
Serna Social is proud to once again be a Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion, and it’s not too late for you to be one, too!