October is over, and this means one thing: it’s time to review our Cybersecurity Month 2024 campaign (CSM24). Let’s take stock of the collaborative efforts, time and dedication involved in planning, coordinating, launching and promoting this year’s campaign. Focusing on social engineering, CSM24 featured the thought-provoking tagline: ‘Your brain is the first line of defence.’ This aimed to encourage users to be vigilant and think critically to stay a step ahead of cyber criminals. The focus was on learning to avoid the psychological tricks widely used by social engineers, such as authority, social proof, liking, reciprocation, and distraction. Throughout the month of October the campaign sought to inspire and educate end-users on crucial cybersecurity topics such as CEO fraud, romance scams, phishing and tailgating, to name a few.
Did you follow the adventures of Jake Doubt?
The four-part animation series features a savvy Head of Security from the fictional University of Guilder, who springs into action when several colleagues become targets of cyber criminals. In each episode, Jake successfully pieces together the puzzle, uncovering who is behind the social engineering attempts and their motives. Narrated in a true crime style, these videos, based on fictional stories, offer a humorous and creative glimpse into the various manipulation techniques used by social engineers today.
Did you spot a colleague in our expert videos?
Eleven short videos from community experts covered a range of topics including romance scams, the dangers of sharing data on social media, the secure use of smartphones, the importance of strong passwords, cyber espionage, password managers, free Wi-Fi dangers, and crisis management. Their expertise and generosity certainly enriched CSM24.
What about the webinars?
As Davina Luyten, the Human Factor sub-task leader, said “What would Cybersecurity Month be without our webinar programme?”. This year’s webinars brought significant depth to our discussions. Security experts from the broader GÉANT community explored insider threat taxonomy, presented a detailed analyses of social engineering, provided an overview of research on the verification of synthetic media, and discussed the responsible and ethical use of AI.
So much great content
The campaign also featured blog articles, interviews and news stories written by experts from the wider community who shared their insights, opinions, and advice on cybersecurity, initiatives, topics and issues. This year’s collection of campaign resources is available for download and use by NRENs and other organisations to promote the campaign and spread the message of cybersecurity awareness.
Here’s the campaign in numbers
- 23 NRENs and many other organisations contributed to the campaign, by providing articles and blog posts, interviews, webinar speakers, interpretation services and by helping us promote the campaign via their channels.
- The overall appreciation rating for the webinar series is 9.9/10, with over 250 registrants.
- More than 7k engagements across 45 campaign posts (organic) on GÉANT’s LinkedIn channel.
The CSM24 may be over, but our cybersecurity awareness activities continue; there is so much more in store for our community in the coming weeks and months.
Visit the new Security Awareness Resources Hub to find security and privacy awareness materials for NRENs, guidelines on how to set up your own awareness programme and much more.
Join our awareness community mailing list, subscribe to receive the newsletter for academia and save the date for Security Days 2025, GÉANT security conference that will take place in Prague on 8-10 April 2025.
Before we know it, we’ll be making plans for CSM25, we can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for what’s next!
You can find the campaign videos, webinars and animations on the GÉANT YouTube channel.
To find out more about GÉANT security awareness initiatives, visit https://security.geant.org/awareness/
