No work this weekend: I took the whole of Saturday and Sunday off - almost like a normal person. Truth is, I hardly ever take a real break. Even at the weekend I've found myself thinking about malware awareness at odd points as I pottered about.   It's a good thing I enjoy my job! 

For those security awareness topics we've covered before, one of our tasks in preparing a new awareness module is to gather up and review the older materials to see if there's anything we can recycle this time around. Collecting the old stuff into a directory is easy enough although sorting and checking through it takes a bit of effort.  The pace of change in information risk and security is notable in that anything written more than maybe 3 or 4 years ago is barely even worth checking: there may be some goodies in there worth reusing (typically some of the graphics and maybe timeless, general materials from the staff awareness stream) but most likely they would have to be revised so substantially to bring them up to date that we might as well start over and re-write them from scratch.  On the other hand, reviewing the older stuff reminds us what were the issues of concern back in the day, and hence how much things have moved on. In years past, our malware awareness modules ha...

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 ...

Aside from coming up with the poster designs, we've made no progress on the awareness module for a couple of days due to working on other stuff - specifically, leading a security metrics workshop in Melbourne. This happens from time to time: real life rudely interrupts.  The awareness stuff doesn't totally stall, though, so long as we use odd spare moments to think about the topic. We also continue hunting for relevant news, products, incidents etc., building a little collection of bookmarked websites that are relevant to the topic.   In recent months, I've also been generating plaintext note files with quotable snippets from the Web plus the URLS, some of which eventually find their way into the newsletters, presentations and other content to illustrate the topics. It might be better to use a Web note app but I can't really spare the time to find one so, for now, a plain text editor does the job just fine.

That previously-mentioned news item about a council struck by ransomware gave Deborah a poster idea. We're thinking about a story-board effect, outlining the incident across maybe 3 or 4 posters. We might add a further 2 or 3 posters about the practical things we can do to reduce the ransomware risk, namely avoiding infection, having up-to-date antivirus software plus up-to-date offline backups. Now all we need to do is come up with the graphic design i.e. suggestions for images and 'tagline' text for the posters.  That's today's task.  It's Waitangi Day here in New Zealand, a public holiday to celebrate the historic agreement between Maori and pakeha (Europeans) signed at Waitangi. It's another warm sunny day.

Nothing to report today: a day off!

We made slow progress again today. One of our regular monthly deliverables is a puzzle of some kind. We used to generate crosswords. About a year back we changed to word-search grids instead. The goal is the same either way: to give people a fun challenge and, hopefully, teach them a few new information security related words or terms in the process. We maintain a library of infosec word lists, so it's easy to dig out the malware word list from the last time the malware module was updated ... but things have moved on since then, which means we need to revise the file ... which involves searching for new terms.  Another of our other regular deliverables is an infosec glossary, a surprisingly useful document that is actively maintained. Every month we work systematically through it, adding or updating the terms and definitions and highlighting whichever entries are relevant to the particular awareness topic. Here's an extract: All those underlined words are hyperlinks to the corr...