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New Cyber-Security PSA Wants You to 'Stop. Think. Connect.'

by Terrence O'Brien on October 7, 2010 at 02:30 PM

Stop Think Connect
"Stop. Think. Connect." That's the unifying message for this year's Cyber Security Awareness Month, and the slogan for a new public education campaign. Said campaign is being spearheaded by the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), countless government agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security), and companies such as Microsoft, Google, PayPal and Facebook. It's a first-of-its-kind campaign in the U.S., a result of widespread fears that the country's digital infrastructure could one day face a serious cyber-attack, and that computer users comprise the Web's weakest link.

The goals of the campaign are twofold. First, the campaign wants users to realize that their actions and their personal levels of computer security have a direct impact on others and on the Internet as a whole. Second, it wants to provide these users with simple, actionable information to improve their own security protocols, thus closing one more avenue used by cyber-criminals and hostile entities. This goes beyond just keeping your security software and operating system up-to-date; the campaign wants users to learn to recognize and ultimately thwart common attacks, like phishing e-mails and the never-ending (and constantly evolving) 419 con. We've covered plenty of ways to recognize and avoid scams, how to keep your data safe, what to do if you get a virus, and how to avoid getting one in the first place, so we won't rehash that all here. But we will remind you to be skeptical of everything, and to remember that everyone else's security is dependent on yours. So, "stop, think, connect" -- in that order, please.

Tags: Anti-phishingWorkingGroup, cyberattack, cybersecurity, CyberSecurityAwarenessMonth, dhs, facebook, google, government, homelandsecurity, microsoft, NationalCyberSecurityAlliance, privacy, security, top, web

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