17 October, 2022 10:01
October 2022 is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s a great time to focus on how you can build your cybersecurity skills and help prevent cybercrime—both personally and professionally.
When was the last time you thought about your role in cybersecurity? For most of us, maybe never. It’s easy to view it as something that other people—or qualified professionals—think about.
But when it comes down to it, cybersecurity is about people—like you and me—applying the basic principles of online protection across all our digital identities. Cybersecurity requires diligence, but common-sense solutions go a long way toward reducing risk. According to this Digital Defense Report, we can protect against 98 percent of cyberattacks by practicing basic security hygiene. If you have access to a digital device, you play a key role in protecting yourself, your family and friends, your employer, and your communities from digital threats.
That’s why the theme of this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month is See Yourself in Cyber—to remind us to make good cybersecurity decisions every day—and getting started is easy.
The growing need for cybersecurity professionals
We expect the need for cybersecurity professionals—and the skills gap—to continue to grow. As reported in a recent Cybersecurity Jobs Report, Cybersecurity Ventures expects that there will be 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs open around the world by 2025.
The profession also faces a diversity gap: 82.4 percent of US cybersecurity jobs are held by men, and 80 percent are held by people who are white. With this gap comes opportunity for improving diversity—according to Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management’s blog post, Microsoft continues to reach out to students, veterans, people re-entering the workforce—and anyone else who’s interested in becoming a cybersecurity defender.
If you’re interested in a career in cybersecurity, check out Cybersecurity Career Awareness Week, which kicks off today.
Cybersecurity is for everyone
Just in time for Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’ve launched the Cybersecurity is for everyone collection on Microsoft Learn. Whether you’re a technology novice, a student, a business decision maker, an administrator specializing in any workload, or an aspiring cybersecurity professional, these resources include something for you:
- Describe the basic concepts of cybersecurity (learning path). Explore the threat landscape across networks, devices, and applications, and understand common mitigation strategies.
- Establish the guiding principles and core components of Zero Trust (learning path). Learn how to apply the Zero Trust strategy, which assumes that every transaction could be an attack and seeks to verify each one.
- Examine ransomware and extortion-based threats (learning path). Understand these threats, the security weaknesses that make them possible, some steps to take, and how to recover from an attack.
- Securing you: Basics and beyond (module). Learn foundational techniques and get straightforward advice to protect your data and accounts online.
Cybersecurity: A critical focus
We move between our digital identities fluidly and don’t always leave them at the door, often leaving ourselves exposed. That’s why cybersecurity must continue to be a priority for all of us—not just in October, but all year long.
Check out the following resources to explore more about cybersecurity:
- Everyone has a role to play in cybersecurity. Explore top resources from security experts at Microsoft.
- What is cybersecurity? Learn about threats, best practices, and solutions.
- Get certified to fight cybercrime. Discover how to kick-start your tech career with a Microsoft Certification
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/cybersecurity-is-for-everyone-this-october-and-all-year/ba-p/2319502 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/cybersecurity-is-for-everyone-this-october-and-all-year/ba-p/2319502 2022-10-17 16:00:00Z