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The first week of October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month kicked off with a bang.
But it wasn’t so much because the campaign itself succeeded at generating awareness about digital threats. Just three days into the month, former Equifax CEO Rick Smith testified to Congress about how the credit-monitoring company lost sensitive data on 145.5 million Americans, and Yahoo said that the infamous hack of its website actually compromised 3 billion accounts, not 1 billion.
Experts like Michael Kaiser and Phil Reitinger have dedicated their careers to warning the world about online threats from bad security. The National Cyber Security Alliance, where Kaiser serves as executive director, helped create the awareness campaign in 2004, but nothing has been more effective than the hacks of 2017 at making security a household word.
After being largely ignored for years, cybersecurity has shouted and shoved its way into the national conversation, thanks to significant attacks that affected personal finances, home devices and the political scene. Researchers saw the writing on the wall for years but often had a difficult time getting the public to listen to their warnings.
“It was my job to be responsible for things like raising awareness of cybersecurity risk,” said Reitinger, CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance and a former cybersecurity director at the Department of Homeland Security. “And I have abjectly failed over the last 20 years, as has everyone else in the industry.”
Talking about security can be complicated, and conversations are usually reactive, not proactive. You might have heard about the Apache Struts vulnerability only after Equifax failed to update a patch, or about the EternalBlue exploit only after the WannaCry attack locked up more than 200,000 computers worldwide.
Even now those names may leave you scratching your head.
It’s a problem in other areas, too: We regularly hear about wildfires, but we don’t talk much about fire prevention. And wow, were there some security infernos in 2017. At least once a month came revelations of a major hack, breach or security flaw. Here’s a list of all the heavy hitters.
Read more: Security finally got the awareness it needed in 2017. Now what?
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