Tag: Phishing

We made it! We got through October, celebrating Halloween, the arrival of fall, and Cybersecurity Awareness Month all in a mere 31 days. Cybersecurity awareness training is over, the course closed on October 31st. More on that in a bit. October also brought us a rash of compromised student accounts, some targeted phishing emails from those accounts and a bit of chaos in the brag/shame leaderboards I produced to track faculty and staff progress in awareness training. The final leaderboard posted with this article is as accurate as I can make it. You can check it out toward the bottom of the article.

Welcome to week four of Cybersecurity Awareness Month! This is the last week and we are winding down both cybersecurity awareness training and the Virtual Scavenger Hunt (VSH). All four weeks of the hunt are now available, so if you were waiting so you wouldn’t have to wait, now is your time!

I understand this email is only one of many you will receive this week, so I want to welcome everyone to the 2026 fall semester and try to cram as much information as I can into as little web page space as possible.

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.

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.