Last updated at Thu, 21 Dec 2023 17:31:14 GMT
It’s smack in the middle of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, or NCSAM, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that. After all, you’re the sort of person who habitually visits security company websites to get the latest news and opinions on all sorts of aspects of cybersecurity.
However, there’s tons and tons of people out there on the internet who, (not so) shockingly, don’t live and breathe infosec. My guess is that you have plenty of friends and family who don’t work and play in our industry. So, while we’re usually content to preach to the cyber choir here, for this year’s NCSAM, we’ve partnered up with NBC’s The Today Show to bring a super fun and fast self-assessment quiz you can forward to all those folks in your varied social circles:
https://www.today.com/money/how-hackable-are-you-take-quiz-find-out-t117489
That’s right, the tables have turned, and now you can be the one to forward internet quizzes to your grammy and your uncle and your high school friends whom Facebook forces you to keep in touch with. Take that, dad!
But really, do consider forwarding this along to someone whom you (a) care about and (b) think might need to be infected with some security memes. The mere fact of being exposed to this quiz might nudge them in the right direction when it comes to how they think about their own security and privacy while living their lives online. It’ll incidentally be good for you, too, since the less hackable your family is, the less hackable you are -- herd immunity and all that. Finally, spreading this wider than our usual industry audience will help us actually capture some more representative data about how people interact with technology.
In the meantime, if you’d like to follow along with the adventures of “Olivia,” a somewhat security-conscious but otherwise pretty typical millennial woman, and how she deals with a paranoid security curmudgeon (played by me), you can start here. If you have any suggestions on what kind of security advice -- practical or impractical -- I should be foisting on her, let me know on Twitter. It’s been a fun couple weeks so far, and I’d love to offer a mix of both sane and insane precautions and countermeasures she can consider while she crash-diets her way through NCSAM.