All news with #security awareness tag

🔒 Join The Hacker News and Specops Software for a Halloween webinar, "Cybersecurity Nightmares: Tales from the Password Graveyard," that examines how weak passwords lead to costly breaches and operational strain. The live session reviews real breach stories, explains why traditional complexity rules fail, and offers a live demo showing how Specops blocks breached passwords in real time and builds compliant, user-friendly policies. Attendees will get a straightforward three-step plan to cut helpdesk resets, meet compliance, and stop credential-based attacks.

🛫 Kaspersky researchers uncovered a widespread email fraud campaign impersonating major airlines and airports to solicit advance refundable deposits. Attackers use convincing business-style messages, registration forms and NDAs rather than malware, then request several-thousand-dollar payments to secure partnership consideration. Recipients are urged to verify sender domains against official corporate contacts and treat any deposit request as a major red flag. Organizations should deploy strong email-gateway defenses and provide targeted security awareness training for finance, sales and procurement teams.

🔐 October's Cybersecurity Awareness Month reminds users that passwords alone no longer provide reliable protection. Adopt MFA wherever possible—prefer authenticator apps or hardware security keys over SMS—and consider emerging passwordless options such as passkeys. Organizations should enforce strong authentication to protect systems, customers and reputation. Watch ESET's video with Tony Anscombe for practical guidance.

⚠ If you clicked a suspicious link, stay calm and act promptly. For work devices, contact IT immediately and follow their instructions. For personal devices, close the browser and check for unexpected downloads; if you entered credentials, change passwords and enable MFA; if financial data was entered, contact your bank; if a file was downloaded, disconnect, run a full scan, and consider restoring from a clean backup. Monitor accounts and report phishing attempts.

🔐 As Cybersecurity Awareness Month begins, Microsoft emphasizes that cybersecurity is both a personal and organizational responsibility. The post spotlights the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative (SFI), which has mobilized more than 34,000 engineers to reduce risk and implement protections such as phishing-resistant multifactor authentication on 100% of production system accounts and 92% of employee productivity accounts. It highlights new resources — including the Be Cybersmart Kit and SFI patterns and practices — plus learning paths, scholarships, and programs to help organizations and students improve security skills.

🔐 October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month, underscoring that the human element is the first and most critical line of defense against cyberthreats. Cybercriminals exploit social engineering and increasingly rely on AI-driven tools to create believable, hyper-personalized scams and deepfakes. Watch the video with ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe for practical insights, and consider ESET's cybersecurity awareness training to strengthen individual and organizational resilience.

🔒 October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a timely reminder that prevention-first strategies are essential as digital threats evolve rapidly. This piece presents five practical tips organizations and individuals can implement — from user training and multi-factor authentication to regular patching and least-privilege access — and stresses the rising risk of AI-driven attacks and the need for layered defenses.

🔍 CISOs increasingly face a torrent of vendor pitches and must probe beyond marketing to find tools that genuinely improve security. Experienced security leaders recommend five core questions about business fit, operational impact, integration and maintenance, update cadence, and concrete use cases. They emphasize live demos and practitioner testing so teams can spot technical gaps and avoid products that merely add noise. Be wary of vague claims, fearmongering, buzzword-heavy pitches, or vendors who resist feedback.

📉 A CIISec poll of UK cybersecurity professionals finds most believe budgets are not keeping pace with rising threats: only 5% say funding is in line with or ahead of risk while 84% disagree. Despite funding concerns, 78% report good or excellent job prospects and 73% expect the security market to grow over the next three years. CIISec recommends prioritizing the people challenge—skills development and communication—since improving talent often costs less and yields faster impact than new tooling.

🔒 The article advises that organizations should proactively restructure security programs instead of waiting for breaches or regulator intervention. It cites the 2024 FTC order against Marriott, following incidents exposing personal data of 344 million guests, as a cautionary example. Practical guidance includes an independent top-to-bottom review, listening tours, delivering quick visible wins, simplifying tool stacks, adopting AI-enabled capabilities, and investing in staff and training. It also outlines frequent mistakes such as insufficient executive buy-in, hiring biases, and underestimating evolving threats.

🔒 Security hardening boosts protection for organizations, especially SMBs, by reducing their attack surface without large additional investments. Key measures include strong authentication and authorization—enforcing strict passwords, multifactor authentication, least-privilege access and network access controls—alongside timely patching, data encryption and segmented, tested backups. Regular staff training, account audits and permission reviews complete a practical, low-cost defense posture.

🛡️ The Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the official start of Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025, centered on the theme Building a Cyber Strong America. Administered by CISA, the campaign urges state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments, small and medium businesses, and supply chain partners to bolster protections for critical services such as water, power, communications, food, and finance. Officials emphasized a whole-of-society approach and recommended immediate adoption of core controls—recognize and report phishing, require long unique passwords, enable multifactor authentication, keep software patched, enable system logging, back up data, and encrypt sensitive information—to improve resilience nationwide.

🛡️ Coherence is framed as the operational backbone for insider-risk programs, stressing shared meaning and alignment rather than surveillance alone. The author argues most insider incidents stem from two vectors — malicious intent and human error — both amplified by semantic drift. Building coherence requires aligning messaging across HR, communications, legal, and security, training for narrative fidelity, equipping line managers with rituals and lexicons, and creating feedback channels that surface drift before behavioral anomalies.

🔒 A YouGov survey commissioned by Initiative Sicher Handeln finds many younger internet users — the so-called Digital Natives — struggle to spot common phishing signals. Nearly half of Gen Z (49%) do not recognise unsolicited attachments as suspicious, and fewer notice impersonal salutations, spelling errors, or bogus urgency. The online poll (Sept 8–10, 2025; 2,044 German adults) prompts the Stop, Question, Protect appeal.

🔒 At DEF CON 33, Google and Airbus hosted the GenSec Capture the Flag (CTF) to promote human–AI collaboration and accelerate adoption of AI in cybersecurity workflows. Nearly 500 participants completed introductory challenges, 23% used AI for security for the first time, and 85% found the event useful for learning practical AI applications. The CTF also featured Sec-Gemini as an optional assistant in the UI; 77% of respondents rated it very or extremely helpful, and organizers are incorporating feedback into future iterations.

🔐 Fortinet’s Veterans Program, in partnership with VetSec, provides veterans and spouses free access to training, hands-on labs, and certification vouchers to accelerate entry into cybersecurity. Participants progress from foundational courses through associate-level credentials, including structured offerings such as the Networking Fundamentals Bootcamp. Graduates like Jeramiah Poff and Derek Zobler reported direct job placements—roles ranging from security architect to cyberthreat hunter—demonstrating measurable workforce impact.

🔐 Selecting an AI platform is necessary but insufficient; successful enterprise adoption hinges on how the system is introduced, integrated, and supported. CISOs must publish a clear, accessible AI use policy that defines permitted behaviors, off-limits data, and auditing expectations. Provision access by default using SSO and SCIM, pair rollout with vendor-led demos and role-focused training, and provide living user guides. Build an AI champions network, harvest practical productivity use cases, limit unmanaged public tools, and keep governance proactive and supportive.

🛡️ The article warns NFT buyers about practical security risks that can turn valuable tokens into worthless assets. It describes attacks such as metadata manipulation and centralized storage that permit creators to change or remove artwork after sale, and marketplace scams that exploit currency symbols and interface design. The piece highlights phishing vectors including Discord takeovers and malicious airdrops, and recommends defenses like multi-wallet segregation, the five-minute rule, and regular permission audits.

🔍Teamwork, problem-solving and analytical thinking now outrank core technical skills in entry-level cybersecurity hiring, according to an ISC2 study of 929 hiring managers across the US, UK, Canada, Germany, India and Japan. The report finds AI is reshaping priorities: managers favour human strengths that AI can't duplicate while routine monitoring is increasingly automated. Experts warn that overreliance on certifications and broken entry pipelines exclude capable candidates, prompting vendors and employers to broaden recruitment through apprenticeships, neurodiverse hiring and outreach to career changers.

🔐 Team-wide VMware certification acts as a force multiplier for security, operations, and talent retention. Certified teams share a common language around architecture, reduce misconfigurations, and respond to incidents faster. Expertise in vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and cloud foundations teaches not just deployment but secure, scalable configuration. Programs like VMUG Advantage make broad certification practical with labs, exam vouchers, and personal-use licenses.