Throughout October, Baldwin Wallace Information Technology Support spreads awareness for Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a month dedicated to preventing against online scams and security issues, by sharing short videos discussing the basics of cybersecurity culture.
Each Sunday throughout the month, IT selects five students who successfully finished their videos or training courses to win a giveaway prize. The grand prize, Beats Studio Buds, is awarded to just one student who completed all the courses during the month.
Brian Krupp, associate professor of computer science, said Cybersecurity Awareness Month is an opportunity for organizations to “reinforce” some of the best practices for employees and even for businesses and consumers.
Krupp defined cybersecurity culture as keeping one’s guard up with their devices and implementing best practices.
“Whether it be from seeing an email come through and going through the mindset of ‘okay, who is this from? How can I verify it?’” Krupp said.
It is essential to take a step back and pay attention to the videos that BW sends out and pay attention to the latest threats that are out there, Krupp said.
“It’s important to make sure your devices and software is updated to protect against threats,” Krupp said.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month can be beneficial for faculty, staff and students to learn how to be cognizant of these issues and take steps for their safety, Krupp said.
Krupp said he recalled an incident at the beginning of the year that involved an “infection of malware.”
“Somebody was sending emails that were supposedly from me, saying they’re going to pay them [students] to do research for me,” Krupp said.
Outside of BW, Krupp said he uses tools such as a Really Simple Syndication reader and a platform called Macedon to keep track of cybersecurity delays and recent security events.
“It can be overwhelming to research how to keep track of the latest threats in cybersecurity, but with an RSS reader, it comes to you,” Krupp said.
Autumn Greene, a junior cybersecurity student, said it was nice to have an event like this to have people more aware of engaging in cybersecurity culture, especially in the instances of “phishing emails.”
Green said that BW’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month brought awareness to the event’s existence as a whole.
“I didn’t know it existed until they [BW IT] sent out emails for it, so, it’s nice to have recognition,” Greene said.
Nox Spears, a first-year computer science student, said it s important that cybersecurity month has brought a lot of awareness, especially with horror scams.
“People would pretend to be certain monsters and creatures in order to convince children to obtain their parent’s credit card information,” Spears said.
