By Douglas Bonilla.
What Does Cybersecurity Mean to You?
That’s the question UC San Diego’s Office of Information Assurance is asking the campus community. This outreach campaign is known as Cybersecurity in Six Words, and was inspired by The Race Card Project. Our campaign seeks to understand how the campus community views cybersecurity in their lives.
Chief Information Security Officer Michael Corn leads the campaign charge. He said, “This is about sharing perspectives and experiences to open up a poignant conversation about cybersecurity. After all, it’s a shared responsibility, something that we all need to take part in; it’s not something only for folks like me to worry about. And that’s why we want to know if security is something you avoid, or something you wish you’d paid more attention to due to identity theft.”
What Are Folks Saying?
With over 160 submissions since its mid June launch, people have had a lot to say. Examples are:
- “Important. Complex. Integrated. Evolving. Layered. Focused.” – Anonymous
- “Where’s my typewriter and my pencil?” – Chris J.
- “Protection. Security. Processes. Integrity. Offense. Defense.” – Tracy J.
- “SEC_RITY is not complete without U!” – Anonymous
Data Systems Analyst Luis Avila’s submission was “Prioritize, Funding, Evaluation, Education, Training.” He offered further insight: “How serious are we about cybersecurity if we’re not openly talking about it? Knowing what has priority allows us to determine funding and labor cost to initiate. Then we can start to evaluate our present and future state and establish how we educate and train people to be more aware in online spaces. And it’s the training and education components that are our biggest sources of difficulty and what affect us the most.”
Corn added, “As I say on our campaign site, our personal lives, our privacy and even our civil rights as citizens are constantly being challenged due to the use and misuse of our personal information. The only way we can really begin to change things for the better is to begin looking at the things that matter most to you and what has affected your sense of security.”
Ronise Zenon, cybersecurity awareness program coordinator, concluded, “We hope to use what we gain here not only to raise awareness of cybersecurity issues around campus, like identity theft and data breaches, but also to further improve our efforts to keep folks safe and secure online.”
Douglas Bonilla is a communication specialist, IT Services, University of California, San Diego.