michaelk's blog

A lot has been written in the last couple of days about the Consumer Reports study on Facebook (Facebook is an NCSA Board Member company) users use of privacy settings. According to the report 13 million of Facebook’s 150 million U.S. users don’t use or aren’t aware of Facebook’s privacy settings and some people also engage in other risky behavior, such as posting about their current location, which could provide information to others, say a burglar, that might want to do them harm. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.

As part of NCSA’s STOP. THINK. CONNECT...

Last month, we ended National Cyber Security Awareness Month with a landmark event. We signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to formally institute and promote cyber security education programs in K-12 schools, higher education, and career and technical education environments nationwide.

Is your computer set to automatically check for software and security updates? Do you type your name in search engines to see what personal information is online? Have you customized your security and personal information settings on social networks? These are all ways to own your online presence by controlling privacy and security settings.

But according to a new Microsoft study, Americans aren’t doing all that they can to protect themselves and their families when they go online.

On October 10^th National Cyber Security Alliance discovered that staysafeonline.org had become the victim of a malicious iframe injection resulting in malicious content potentially being delivered to visitors to the website. 

As soon as the threat was discovered immediate action was taken to prevent any further spread of the malicious content including immediately taking our website offline. We are grateful to MSISAC and our many other friends in the security community that alerted us to the issue and helped us clean up the situation.

If you visited staysafeonline.org between October 5 – 11 there is a chance that your system may have been exposed to malicious content.

If you did, make sure that your system is running the latest anti-virus programs and is up to date with the latest signatures. Most of the popular AV programs were catching the threat. We strongly recommend that you scan your computer. Most major security software and Anti-virus programs offer a free scan of your computer. You can also find a list of free security scans here. 

As we always recommend, you should have the most current, up-to-date software, including operating system, security, firewall, and web browser, as well as any additional applications you use.

We regret this happened and hope it hasn’t caused you any inconvenience.

Keeping Internet safe and secure requires the vigilance of all of us.

Michael Kaiser

Executive Director, National Cyber Security Alliance

President Obama today proclaimed October National Cyber Security Awareness Month!

The full text of the proclamation is as follows:

NATIONAL CYBERSECURITY AWARENESS MONTH, 2011

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Today, the Department of Commerce released a study about the gender gap of women in STEM careers. The report indicates some significant issues regarding women in STEM:

• Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs. This has been the case throughout the past decade, even as college-educated women have increased their share of the overall workforce.

Today in a post on the Official Google (NCSA Board member Company) Blog titled Ensuring Your Information is Safe Online Eric Grosse, Engineering Director, Google Security Team announced that Google had:
“Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users

Mayor Bloomberg has noble intentions in making New York City the world’s highest-ranking digital city and with the recent release of, “Road Map for the Digital City: Achieving New York City’s Digital Future,” he underscored this goal even further. The great thing about this plan is that it leverages the collective power of New York’s digital sector to keep citizens engaged, provide Internet access, and support municipal functions. The disappointing part is that the plan does not take an aggressive approach to cybersecurity and online safety – a flaw that could turn his dream of a digital city into a nightmare.
 

This morning the National Cyber Security Alliance released its 2011 State of Cyberethics, Cybersafety and Cybersecurity Curriculum in the U.S. Survey . The survey has been sponsored for the last two years by Microsoft.

NCSA conducts this study to get a better understanding of attitudes and practices toward cybersecurity, cyberethics, and cybersafety education in the United States.