Feds’ New Cyber Risks Awareness Campaign to Help Private Sector Companies

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The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) started a new campaign – the “Know the Risk, Raise your Shield” campaign for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Its purpose is to boost public awareness regarding cyber threats and to have companies in all industries to improve their data security processes and cyber defenses.

The campaign informs businesses the need to secure passwords, take care of social media accounts, utilize safety procedures to guard against phishing and spear phishing, verify the identity of a caller prior to sharing any sensitive information over the telephone and beware of your privacy when traveling internationally since digital devices are vulnerable to surveillance and interference.

The campaign intends to provide U.S. businesses tips that would help them in facing current cyber threats recommending steps they must do to improve their defenses against those challenges.

Well-financed threat actors are targeting private firms in the America to gain access to sensitive information, proprietary data and are bothering supply chains. Threat actors from Russia are the greatest threat, even though there are also independent hackers from China, Iran and North Korea that target U.S. organizations.

The intention of threat actors for attacking include financial gain, business interruption and political motives. The attacks put at risk U.S. national safety and global competitiveness. The cost of continual and ruthless attacks include hampered work opportunities, economic drawback, and a big amount of dollars.

The campaign developed a collection of instructional videos covering these topics:

  • Social engineering
  • Social media lies
  • Spear phishing
  • Human targeting
  • Travel consciousness
  • Economic espionage
  • Supply chain risk management

The NCSC has provided posters, pamphlets, and flyers to help promote employee awareness about the threats. The training resources may be downloaded from this page.