Staying safe online. The Office of Cybersecurity is here to help.

You don’t need to be an IT professional to protect your online data. There are simple tools and websites that can help you to reduce your risk of a cyber threat. Learn more about these tools and sites on our website celebrating Cybersecurity Awareness Month (Source: it.wisc.edu).

This year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month theme is “See Yourself in Cyber.” Our personal and professional lives have moved online, and with that change comes the added responsibility to keep our data and the UW’s data protected. If you see yourself on the internet, then you should see yourself as a cybersecurity steward.

Here are four tips for increasing your security, or simply staying safe, online:

1. Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) (Source: it.wisc.edu) on all your accounts that offer it and never accept an MFA push that you didn’t generate.
2. Pump up your passwords. Make your accounts difficult to hack by using a password manager, like LastPass Enterprise (Source: it.wisc.edu), to generate and remember complicated passwords for each of your accounts.
3. Beware of the phish! If a link looks suspicious, don’t click it! See how well you do in recognizing a phishing attempt with the phishing quiz (Source: phishingquiz.withgoogle.com).
4. Keep your operating system and software up to date. Learn how at Tips for Safe Web Browsing (Source: it.wisc.edu)

One of the mainstays of our work in the Office of Cybersecurity is to keep the campus and campus community secure from cyber threats and cyber attacks. We do this through updating our endpoint management policies, providing risk assessments, monitoring the campus network for vulnerabilities, providing robust cybersecurity training opportunities to students and staff alike and much more. To learn more about how we protect and reduce risk, please visit the Office of Cybersecurity website (Source: it.wisc.edu).