2023 marks the 20th annual Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the U.S. federal government’s tradition of promoting careful cyber hygiene and ensuring protective precautions for digital assets. Established by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and a nonprofit, the National Cybersecurity Alliance, every October for the last two decades has been devoted to various initiatives supporting the increasingly important cause.
Potomac Officers Club’s next Cyber Summit will take place in May 2024. The most recent edition featured top officials from the Department of Defense, the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, alongside private sector executives from ManTech, Xage Security and more. Like Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Cyber Summit is a highlight of the cyber sector every year and a key place where industry and government can cross-pollinate ideas and strategies. Save your spot now to make sure you have a place at the event.
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month draws to a close, we’ve collected some key developments worth remembering:
- The year’s edition was themed Secure Our World by the two organizations and provided four key actions for individuals, businesses and agencies to concentrate:
- Enable multi-factor authentication
- Use strong passwords and a password manager
- Update software
- Recognize and report phishing
- The National Security Agency and CISA jointly released an advisory on Oct. 5 that enumerated 10 common misconfigurations in enterprise IT defense, advising on possible ways to amend these missteps.
- Among them: software and application configurations, improper user and administrator privilege separation and insufficient monitoring of internal networks.
- On Monday, CISA issued a resource guide outlining a supply chain resilience plan aimed at small- and medium-sized information and communications technology businesses. It details critical suppliers, supplier diversity actions, as well as a vendor attestation process.
- On Wednesday, CISA and the Department of Health and Human Services released a new toolkit to help healthcare organizations improve their cybersecurity posture. The toolkit includes resources on risk assessment, incident response and vulnerability management.
You don’t have to wait until next October to continue the conversation. Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Cyber Summit will maintain the spirit of Cybersecurity Awareness Month with impactful discourse and solution-minded crosstalk. Register here for the May 2024 event now!
