28 days of awareness: day 9

Today we had a slight setback: our graphics team decided our poster ideas were too ambitious for the short time remaining this month (fair enough!) so we had to come up with some fresh designs.

Given that we've covered the malware topic every year since the service was launched in 2003, it is getting harder every time to come up with fresh creative designs. On the other hand, malware is constantly evolving so it's simply a matter of catching the latest wave for fresh inspiration.

In addition to the usual everyday slew of spyware incidents, malware-fueled credit card hacks and so on, ransomware stories are all over the news lately so ransomware looks like a theme worth emphasizing in the awareness materials this time around. For me, the act of holding someone's ICT device hostage stirs memories of the long dark days of Terry Waite's captivity in Lebanon, and many others since. Who can forget those haunting images of some bearded and bedraggled hostage, crudely roped to a chair in a dismal makeshift basement cell and obviously under extreme duress, their menacing captors brandishing weapons at the camera?

Let's see what the graphics people come up with along those lines: we're thinking of computer devices roped to chairs, and classic ransom[ware] notes composed of letters cut-n-pasted from newspapers.  "SeNd US biTcoiN oR yoUr DATA geTS TrasheD"!