October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, dedicated to shedding light on the importance of taking practical steps to safeguard sensitive data and shield against losses in the event of a data breach or compromise.  This year’s cybersecurity awareness month’s theme is Secure Our World, and there are four main focuses for individuals to stay safe online:

1. Use strong passwords: make sure that they are long, unique and complex. A password manager is a great tool that can help you keep track of all of your passwords in one secure location. 
2. Turn on multifactor authentication: Also called two-factor authentication or two-step verification, this is a cybersecurity measure that requires anyone logging in to prove their identity in multiple ways. Find out if your accounts and devices offer multifactor identification, and get them set up if you haven’t already done so.
3. Recognize and report fishing: There are common, clear signs of a phishing email (does it seem too good to be true? Are there misspellings and bad grammar? Does it stress urgency to click on an unfamiliar hyperlink?) and once you become familiar with them, it is easy to recognize it as fake and delete it. The next step is to report the phishing attempt to the Federal Trade Commission.
4. Update software: When you install the latest updates for devices, software and apps you are getting the best security available and also ensuring that you get access to the latest features and upgrades. Setting up automatic updates for your software is step you can do once that will make sure that you don’t miss any updates in the future. 

The National Cybersecurity Alliance has a ton of great material available to help you dive deeper into each of these focuses, as well as other helpful cybersecurity tips at: https://staysafeonline.org/programs/cybersecurity-awareness-month/

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