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Wait, didn’t you just get a newsletter a few days ago? Yes, but that was May, and May is busy. It is now June and by the time you are reading this, I will be out of the office enjoying some vacation. I hope everyone is able to do the same at some point this summer. Whatever you do, don’t take a vacation from being cyber-aware and vigilant about protecting your data.
Welcome to this midweek and very late edition of the monthly newsletter. As many of you are aware, there have been major events happening in the information security and higher education world. I’m going to briefly discuss both of the top issues (in my opinion) in this newsletter. Be prepared for some irony, skepticism and inevitability.
By the time you read this, Easter will have passed and April will be in its second week! I hope your Easter weekend was great, however you decided to spend it. We are now in the home stretch for the spring semester. Before we change months again, classes will be over, finals will be happening and we will all be preparing for the summer break. It will be here before we know it. In this last month of the spring semester, I want to bring back to mind some topics we have touched on over the academic year.
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.