Welcome to week three of Cybersecurity Awareness Month! As of the time this was written, only somewhere between a quarter and a third of faculty and staff had completed the required cybersecurity awareness training for fall 2025. The October 31st deadline will be here before you know it and reminder emails are going out already. Students, remember that I am bribing you with the possibility of winning a cool prize for finishing the training. You also only have until October 31st to complete the Cybersecurity Awareness Month scavenger hunt. Right now, those who have completed it have great odds for winning one of the prizes in the drawings. Get out there and hunt down those clues! But for a few more minutes, continue reading about our two topics for this week – keeping your software up to date and important information on why you should not use your Berry email account for personal business.
All software has coding errors, what we like to call bugs. Some bugs have minimal impact on the functionality and safety of the software, but other bugs can be exploited to gain control over your device or your account. This is why it is very important to keep the software on your devices updated. Whether it is your laptop or desktop, or your phone or tablet, you need to keep the applications and the core operating system up to date. Most phones and tablets can do this automatically, as can both Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, but you have to sometimes restart the devices to make the updates go into effect. If you use a managed machine here on the college campus, updates are applied automatically, but again, you must restart the computer for them to activate.
Particular pieces of software that get and need frequent updates are web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari. All of these have automatic updates on by default, but must be restarted for the updates to work. Other software includes the Adobe Creative Suite, if you have that installed on your machine, and even Microsoft Office gets regular updates, but requires a restart of the program for them to apply.
Are you sensing a theme? For updates to be effective, devices and software must be restarted. You should make a point to restart your devices at least once a week. Yes, it is annoying (I hate to have to restart my computer), but it is very important.
The following section of this article was written by my awesome student worker.
While devices like smartphones, laptops, and smart-TVs can be personal devices, these devices can also be managed by a company, or school, making them company-managed devices. Conducting personal business on company-managed devices can be dangerous to both your data and the college’s. You should also keep a barrier between personal data and work data, by having a personal email and work email (your Berry email). It is important to keep all personal information from mixing with work data, because if there is a case where information is lost, or breached, one account will not be at risk as opposed to the other account.
Common ways that people mix personal and work data are through streaming subscriptions, banks, medical sites, newspaper subscriptions, and sharing credit card information. This happens when you enter your college email into non-school related websites, as a means of contact or username.
In addition to the dangerous aspects of mixing data, it is also not convenient! Imagine a work or personal account shuts down or data is lost? That data goes down the drain, and you no longer have access to it. This just makes life more of a hassle if you need to work on a project, and finding files to recover takes a lot longer than just keeping information separate, not to mention personal data that you do not want seen by the college!
With that being said, do not use your Berry email for anything personal, especially sites that prompt you to use personal information like credit card numbers. Your personal and work data should be kept private and separate to protect yourself and the school.
Happy CAM week 3!
That’s all we have for this week. Complete that training, attempt the scavenger hunt! We’ll be back one more time next week with two new topics.
NCSAM Week 4 – BYOD, Know Your Devices, and Keep Up With Your Devices
CAM 2022 Week 3 – Multi-factor Authentication
