Cybersafety Awareness Month

October is Cybersafety Awareness Month, also known as Cyber Security Awareness Month or just Cyber Month. Cybersafety Awareness Month is an internationally recognized campaign that aims to help the public learn more about the importance of cyber security and how they can stay cyber safe. Cybersafety Awareness Month is filled with resources that help Canadians stay safe online, such as guides, courses, or simple steps they can take to protect their personal accounts and devices.

Each year, Cybersafety Awareness Month follows a theme to promote during the month of October. This year, the #CyberMonth2024 theme is ‘Generation Cyber Safe: Because online security knows no age’. Throughout the month, each week will focus on a specific theme related to cybersafety for all ages, taking the unique strengths of each generation to make us all collectively safer online.

🔐 Week 1: The Most Secure Generation

The first week of Cybersafety Awareness Month will focus on the importance of securing your personal accounts online. Having proper security measures set up for your accounts is your first line of defence online, and learning how to set strong and unique passwords is an important skill to have. In addition to having unique passwords, here are a few other things you can do to secure your accounts:

Set Up Multi-Factor Authentication

Setting up multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to your accounts and helps to verify your personal identity. Multi-factor authentication reduces the risk of unauthorized access to your accounts, and makes it harder for unauthorized people to log in with stolen credentials.

Consulte nuestro Two-factor Authentication: Cybersafety tipsheet to learn more about what 2 factor authentication is, how it works, and why you should be enabling it across all your accounts!

Gestores de contraseñas

Setting up password managers is an excellent way to ensure your passwords are stored in a safe place, and also allows you to set completely random and difficult to guess passwords for each of your accounts. This minimizes the chances of your accounts being hacked into. Password managers are an quick and easy way to protect your identity, and they make it easy to securely change or share your passwords.

Learn more about password managers by reading through our Gestores de contraseñas: Qué son y cómo usarlos tipsheet.

Limiting The Information That You Share Online

Limiting the information that you share online can be one of the simplest ways to protect yourself online. Keep in mind that everything on the internet is easily discoverable, and stay aware of your digital footprint. Be cautious about sharing any personal or sensitive information that could be used against you or used to gain access to your accounts, either through impersonating you or by hacking into your accounts.

To learn more about how to safely share your photos online, check out this blogpost form Día Mundial de la Fotografía 2024: Comparte tus fotos en línea de forma segura!

🍎 Week 2: The Most Resourceful Generation

The second week of Cybersafety Awareness Month focuses on the different tools you can use to protect yourself from common online threats, such as:

Anti-virus Protection

Anti-virus software, also known as anti-malware, is software that is used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Anti-virus software helps to detect and remove computer viruses, protect against malicious URLs, spam, and phishing. It is highly recommended to do research into trusted anti-virus protection softwares that you can install on your own devices.

Enabling Automatic Updates

If you haven’t already, it is always a good idea to enable automatic updates for your devices. System updates often include essential security fixes that address various system vulnerabilities, so as soon as an update is available you want to update your device and resolve those issues. This greatly shortens the amount of time your devices may be vulnerable and ensures that your systems are up to date and running the newest, safest version of the operating system available.

Using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Securing Your Networks

Virtual private networks (VPNs) are important to making sure your online activity is not being tracked, and allows you to safely access global content. It is important to make sure you are always using secure networks or VPNs as necessary, and when connecting to public wifi networks always be careful of what information you’re accessing. As a general rule of thumb, avoid accessing any personal or sensitive information such as banking information when connected to public wifi networks as those are typically not secure and your information can be easily accessible by others.

Countering Malware and Ransomware

Malware and ransomware are malicious programs that are harmful to the systems of your personal devices. Ransomware is malware that typically locks the users access to their personal information until a ransom is paid. It is important to learn how to protect yourself and your devices against malware and ransomware to protect and secure your personal and sensitive information.

For more information about malware, check out our Malware: Qué es y cómo evitarlo en 3 pasos tipsheet.

🌐 Week 3: The Most Social Generation

Week 3 of Cybersafety Awareness Month is called ‘The Most Social Generation,’ and it focuses on everything to do with social media and using the internet as a means of staying social. As humans and regardless of your generation, we all inherently feel the need to stay connected. For our younger and future generations to come, the easiest way to stay connected is through social media. However, we’ve already begun seeing some potential dangers to social media, and this week we’ll go over a few of the key threats and how to stay safe against them.

Phishing

Phishing is a form of social engineering and scam that can affect anyone. Phishing is a scam in the form of an email that impersonates a trusted authority or institution to trick the user into revealing sensitive information. These emails can often look like warnings of some sort that prompt the user to take immediate action by clicking on a provided link or button, which then reveals your personal information to the scammer and gives them control over your account.

In addition to phishing though, we’d like to raise some awareness to chishing y gamishing. Chishing is chat based phishing while gamishing is game based phishing, and both of these target teens specifically. Scammers using chishing will impersonate your friends, families, or other trusted sources, while scammers using gamishing will often mimic legitimate in-game communications such as offering fake rewards, cheats, or threatening account closure. To learn more about these scams, check out our Cybersafety For Teens resource.

In order to protect yourself from phishing emails, check out our Truco del estafador: Phishing tipsheet to learn how to spot phishing emails and some best practices when dealing with phishing scams.

Sign up for our phishing campaign aquí in order to receive fake phishing emails that test your ability to identify phishing scams.

Social Engineering

Social engineering scams are when people use a variety of methods meant to gain your trust and make you fall into their trap. This can look like someone impersonating authority figures, using extortion, or using emotional manipulation, amongst many other methods. In order to protect yourself from social engineering scams, stay alert when dealing with unexpected messages or emails. If receiving unexpected texts, emails, or phone calls, always verify the information with a trusted source and never give the other person any of your personal information or click on anything they prompt you to.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Generated Content

With artificial intelligence technology on the rise, it is more important than ever before to stay informed on how to deal with AI generated content and desinformación. AI generated content can be misleading, purposefully manipulated, or completely fabricated. Learn how to identify AI generated content, and take things you see on the internet with a grain of salt. Always verify your information with a variety of sources!

Learn about the Escaneado C.R.I.S.P., a useful technique for quickly identifying disinformation, fake news, and fake claims.

For AI generated images specifically, learn more about why it’s important to be able to identify them and what the rise of artificial intelligence can mean aquí.

🏆 Week 4: The Most Proactive Generation

Week four of Cybersafety Awareness Month emphasizes the importance of being proactive with your online safety and covers a wide range of topics from physical storage back ups to resources for cyber safety awareness and training. We’ll go over some of the cybersecurity best practices for protecting yourself online.

Back Ups And Storage

Although it is incredibly easy to store data, important files, and photos online, it is important to still keep back ups of your important files and photos. This can look like backing up your information to multiple places, backing things up periodically onto a physical hard drive, or even keeping physical copies of your most sensitive information. This is just in case something happens to your devices, either with a vulnerability in your system that leads to your information being deleted or compromised or due to a scammer gaining access to your account. Having back ups ensures that if something happens to one version, you still have multiple secure copies.

How to Spot A Secure Business

With so many businesses running primarily out of an online storefront nowadays, here are some important tips to keep in mind when trying to verify the validity of a business.

• Check the browser’s address bar for a key or padlock icon. This indicates a secure network connection.
• If the URL is https:// rather than just http, the additional ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’, meaning any communication transferred through the site is secure and encrypted
• Look for a physical business address and confirm the location through Google Maps
• Keep an eye out for typos, suspicious offers, or sites with lots of pop-up ads. Low-quality websites can indicate scams, so be careful not to click on anything you suspect is a scam.

Cybersecurity Awareness And Training

Of course, in honour of Cybersafety Awareness Week, it’s important to share the importance of cybersecurity awareness and training. At KnowledgeFlow, our Academia de Ciberseguridad offers a wide range of free, self-paced online courses that are specifically designed to increase your personal cybersafety skills. Take some time to explore which courses would be best suited to your cybersafety knowledge and goals.

💗 Week 5: The Most Helpful Generation

Our last week of Cybersafety Awareness Month, week five, is all about how you can make sure everyone around you is also staying safe online. Share this event and all our resources with your friends, families, and colleagues to ensure that they also know how to stay safe online. Throughout the course of Cybersafety Awareness Month, we challenge you to take your personal cybersafety into your own hands, and do something each week to improve your cybersafety, your cybersafety literacy, or help someone else in your life stay informed on their personal cybersafety! Here’s one challenge to start you off this month: explain the Estafa a los abuelos to one senior in your life, whether they’re a family member, friend, or colleague!

 

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Happy Cybersafety Awareness Month everyone! We hope everyone is able to learn something new this Cybersafety Awareness Month and can help us in our mission to make all Canadians #UnHackable!

For more information on how to protect yourself online and practice cybersafety, be sure to check out our comprehensive ‘Cybersafety For Everyone’ online course.