The Office of Information Security’s (OIS) Awareness, Behavior, and Culture (ABC) team is focused on infusing good cybersecurity practices into everything we do here at WashU. We work to provide the WashU community with the tools we all need to safely navigate the cyberspace. That landscape is full of would-be scammers and bad actors who understand the value of the data we handle and produce here. They are continually evolving their tactics to make it hard to differentiate legitimate requests from malicious ones.
One of our recent efforts includes placing more messaging in more locations while measuring where we see the most engagement. This allows us to better understand how to deliver this critical information with little disruption to your day-to-day workflows. We have a deep appreciation for the incredible and often groundbreaking work being done on our campuses. Our ABC team makes it a top priority to deliver the information you need in creative ways that will empower you to keep working without disruption. Anyone who has had experience with being the victim of a social engineering attack will tell you it is time-consuming, frustrating, and often costly to remediate. Our best option is always to identify the attack before interacting with it and send it to our office to analyze and take the necessary steps to eliminate the threat from our systems.
We are a diverse community working in many ways in many different areas. ABC’s goal is to expand our reach to all groups within the university. As we work to expand the ways we reach you, here are a few priorities we have set to be sure we get the most impact from this work:
- Important topics will be communicated in creative ways for lasting impact.
- Our initiatives will be unique in their purpose and modality, whether they be comic strips, tabletop advertisements, digital signage, or something else.
- We will tailor our approach to speak to the respective audiences at WashU and their cybersecurity needs.
- Data will drive our marketing pursuits, helping us better understand which initiatives resonate most with the community.
- We will create opportunities for engagement to make learning more fun and provide opportunities to win prizes along the way, to thank you for your help with securing our institution.
We have kicked this new effort off by posting an original comic strip on bulletin boards in several buildings on the Danforth campus, with more to come. This is the first of a series of initiatives focused on ensuring students (and anyone else in those spaces) know how easily they can report phishing by simply clicking the Phishing Alert Button (PAB) in any version of Outlook. For this particular effort, I am joined by fellow ABC teammates, Allison Webster and Minjung Song, whose talents have expanded the possibilities for what we can do. We encourage you to be on the lookout as we develop and publicize more great original content in the coming months.
