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Welcome to March and all that March means to our progress through the semester. This newsletter publishing during Spring Break is no accident. It is aimed squarely at faculty and staff. I want to take the opportunity to reiterate some cybersecurity awareness points I have been trying to make over the past few months. We’re not talking about good passwords or password managers or phishing (well, maybe a little about phishing). While all of those topics are important, I want to focus two other very important topics: improper uses of your Berry College email account and the safe use of your Berry purchasing cards, or P-cards. Recent activity exposed by our cybersecurity systems show alarming practices that need to stop as soon as possible.
The new year is hurtling along and February is upon us. We’ve rolled out Cybersecurity Awareness Training for the semester and I want to take this moment to thank the more than 150 users who have completed the training already. I designed it to be fast, widely applicable, and easy to complete. I hope you find it so. While I didn’t put a lot of content about phishing in the training course, I will take this opportunity to update everyone about the current state of phishing now that we have had generative AI around for years now.
Welcome to part two of our Data Privacy Week activity. As I mentioned in part one, this article discusses privacy from the perspective of the responsibilities of the college and you as an employee or student worker. There are a number of laws that address protecting collected personal data and a few specifically aimed at higher education. We’ll discuss a couple and then I’ll fill you in on how cybersecurity awareness training will work for this semester.
Welcome to Data Privacy Week, brought to you by the same group who promotes Cybersecurity Awareness Month. We’re getting a late start on the week due to the winter storm that, thankfully, only gave us some rain, but I know that many of your hometown were affected and I hope that everyone was able to adjust, and will continue to adjust as cold temperatures stay with us.
Welcome to 2026! I hope your holidays were restful and enjoyable. Mine were very good, but of course, not long enough. The world kept on spinning while we took some time to relax and prepare for a brand new year. I gave you a month off from the newsletter in December, so I have plenty to catch you up on this month
Here we are in November already…fall is here, the holidays are approaching, the semester is starting to wind down and we’re done with Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Prizes have been awarded for scavenger hunts and completing training (for students). We had 17 people complete the hunt and 33 others jump into hunting down clues and learning about cybersecurity at the same time. I hope everyone enjoyed the hunt.
We have one final topic this last week of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. We’re talking about spotting phishing emails and scams and how to report them. After I explain the process to report phishing emails and where to report other types of scams, Gabby, my student worker has a “Halloween-ized” section on how to spot those “scary” phishing emails and also explains spear phishing.