All news with #security awareness tag

🛡️ ISC2’s 2025 Cybersecurity Workforce Study of 16,029 professionals finds that skills shortages have overtaken headcount as the primary concern for security teams. Budget constraints leave 33% of respondents unable to adequately staff and 29% unable to afford skilled hires, while 88% reported at least one incident linked to skills gaps. The report highlights rapidly accelerating AI adoption—69% are at some adoption stage—and stresses capability development, targeted training, and realistic workload expectations over simple headcount increases.

🔒 Organizations face an escalating threat landscape and an expanding cyber skills gap that compliance-focused training cannot close. Platforms like Cybrary, in partnership with Check Point Infinity Global Services, emphasize role-based, hands-on learning—combining industry certifications, simulated labs, and tailored learning paths to better prepare security teams for incident response, SOC operations, and threat hunting. This practical approach strengthens resilience by enabling measurable skills and reducing real-world vulnerabilities.

🔐 Samantha Stallings argues that cybersecurity benefits from a wide range of backgrounds and talents, not just traditional STEM training. She challenges common stereotypes — the lone hacker or the inevitable technical prodigy — and shows how many roles contribute to effective threat research. Drawing on her own path from art school to Technical Writing Manager and referencing examples such as Dr. Sian Proctor, Stallings emphasizes that writers, marketers, product managers, and social media professionals all have valuable places in security teams. The piece is a direct invitation for nontechnical professionals to consider careers in cybersecurity.

🔒 The article argues that cybersecurity succeeds when practitioners replace damaging mindsets with sustainable ones. It highlights six common but harmful beliefs—security as a destination, security only for specialists, the idea that security always gets harder, treating security as a product, assuming criminals control priorities, and chasing perfect metrics—and explains how each fosters burnout and reactive behavior. The author recommends reframing security as a continuous, shared discipline embedded in daily operations and development lifecycles to improve resilience and team cohesion.

🔐 Infinity Global Services (IGS) has launched its first dedicated AI security training courses, the initial release in a growing AI services portfolio. The programs offer expert-led instruction and hands-on labs to help security teams, developers, and leaders defend against AI-driven threats and implement AI securely across operations and product development. IGS also plans upcoming offerings in AI red teaming, governance, and implementation consulting to extend defensive and advisory capabilities.

🤖 The Future Report, based on responses from over 7,000 European teenagers, finds young people largely optimistic and adept at using AI and algorithmic platforms in daily life. Many report educational benefits—47% say AI explains complex topics, and 81% of users feel it improved aspects of learning or creativity—while also expressing concerns about over-reliance, trust, and skill erosion. The report calls for strengthened digital literacy, age-appropriate experiences, and youth participation in shaping responsible AI design.

📘 The Future Report, produced with youth consultancy Livity, surveyed over 7,000 teenagers (13–18) across France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden about their digital lives and expectations. It finds that 40% use AI daily or almost daily and that 81% of users report AI improved aspects of learning or creativity. Teens are largely optimistic yet express concerns about over-reliance, skill erosion and information trustworthiness. The report recommends stronger digital literacy, safety measures and meaningful youth participation in design and policy.

🔒 CISA announced participation in the Office of Personnel Management’s CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service (SFS), offering internship and postgraduate career pathways to eligible scholarship recipients. With OPM adding 100 new SFS internship roles, CISA will place undergraduate selectees in time-limited excepted service appointments and may offer full-time excepted service positions to postgraduates. The initiative is intended to develop a skilled federal cybersecurity workforce and accelerate leadership in national cyber defense.

🕶️ MSC Cruises has added smart glasses and similar wearable devices to its list of prohibited items in public areas, citing the risk of covert recording and security exposures. The new rule means devices such as Ray‑Ban Meta or Google Glass may be confiscated by ship security if used in restricted spaces. The line argues that smart glasses are harder for bystanders to notice than phones or cameras, increasing privacy concerns. Critics counter the ban restricts helpful features like translation and accessibility.

🔐 Organizations often assume stricter, more complex controls automatically increase security. The article identifies five common UX-driven mistakes — poor security mindset, one-size-fits-all policies, confusing complexity with protection, reliance on legacy security questions, and misplaced faith in biometrics — that can degrade defenses. Experts Yehudah Sunshine, Joseph Steinberg and April McBroom recommend practical measures such as targeted training, contextual controls, password managers, multiple-choice knowledge checks, and behavioral biometrics. Their guidance emphasizes reducing friction, encouraging honest reporting of errors, and tailoring security to user roles to improve both usability and protection.

🔒 Cyber hygiene is presented as an essential, routine set of practices to reduce digital risk and protect personal data. The article gives targeted, practical advice for three audiences: beginners (use a password manager, create long random passwords and enable MFA), intermediate users (prioritize patch management, remove unused extensions, secure home routers and IoT, and use VPNs), and cybersecurity professionals (model good behavior and build a security-aware culture). Small, regular actions can greatly reduce exposure and improve resilience.

🎄 AI and automation are enabling more sophisticated holiday scams in 2025, making fraudulent emails, fake retail sites, and social media giveaways harder to detect. Check Point researchers flagged over 33,500 Christmas-themed phishing emails and more than 10,000 suspicious holiday ads within a 14-day window, underscoring a global surge. Practical guidance emphasizes recognizing red flags, validating sellers, and using multi-factor authentication and updated security tools to protect holiday shoppers.

🔑 Implementing Zero Trust requires more than technical changes — it demands executive-level communication that reframes security risks and benefits in business terms. Security leaders should translate technical concepts into outcomes executives care about: reduced attack surface, lower costs, simpler operations and regulatory resilience. Start with CTOs and infrastructure teams, then engage business unit heads with tailored conversations and regular briefings to build trust and momentum.

🏆 Check Point's Infinity Global Services (IGS) concluded its inaugural Cyber Park World Championship, organized with community partner CheckMates and training specialist Cympire. Hundreds of participants worldwide competed in realistic cyber ranges, demonstrating technical mastery, incident response skills, and effective teamwork under pressure. The event showcased hands-on cyber simulations within IGS training programs and crowned the first global winners, reinforcing Check Point's commitment to upskilling defenders and strengthening the security workforce.

🔧 Staff+ security engineers should move from being individual problem-solvers to force multipliers by enabling others, automating enforcement, and shaping security strategy. The article recommends practical mechanisms—policy-as-code, paved paths, mentorship trees—and disciplined delegation to scale impact. It urges embedding security via shift-left practices, reusable reference architectures, and cautious AI-assisted tooling. During incidents, act as an orchestrator, set inflection points, and bridge teams with leadership to preserve strategic influence.

🧑‍💻 A Google‑commissioned study by youth specialists Livity centers the voices of over 7,000 European teenagers to show how adolescents want technology designed with people in mind. Teens report widespread, routine use of AI for learning and creativity and ask for clear, age‑appropriate guidance rather than blanket bans. The report recommends default-on safety and privacy controls, curriculum-level AI and media literacy, clearer reporting and labeling, and parental support programs.

🧑‍💻 Save the Children’s senior advisor on Protecting Children from Digital Harm summarizes a Google-commissioned study by Livity that centers over 7,000 European teenagers. Teens report technology supports learning and wellbeing when built with a human-first approach and when they can participate in design rather than be cut off. They use AI regularly for schoolwork and creative tasks and call for clear, age-appropriate guardrails, stronger default privacy and safety settings, and AI/media literacy in curricula.

📱 The Senate Committee on Armed Services concluded that unsecured use of non‑approved messaging apps is a wider problem in the Department of Defense. It found that Secretary Pete Hegseth violated policy by sharing operational details on Signal from a personal device two hours before a strike and inadvertently added a journalist to the group. The reports cite broader “shadow communications,” limited audit evidence, and recommend approved alternatives, training, and tighter authority controls.

🔐 The Getting to Yes anti-sales guide helps MSPs and MSSPs reframe cybersecurity conversations from fear-based pitches into collaborative business partnerships. It catalogs common objections—cost, perceived protection, small size, complexity, and time—and provides empathetic, evidence-driven responses that tie security to uptime, revenue, reputation, and compliance. The guide introduces a trust-first framework (Empathy, Education, Evidence) and explains how automation, fast assessments, posture dashboards, and measurable milestones make value visible and scalable.

🔒 In this Deputy CISO blog, Damon Becknel, Microsoft’s VP and Deputy CISO for Regulated Industries, outlines four immediate priorities organizations should act on now. He emphasizes reinforcing essential cyber hygiene—accurate asset inventories, network segmentation, timely patching, MFA, EDR, and proxying email and web traffic—as the most effective means to reduce common intrusions. Becknel also urges adoption of modern standards like phishing-resistant MFA, secure DNS and DMARC, deployment of fingerprinting to track bad actors, and active cross-industry collaboration to share threat signals and raise the cost of attack.