It’s October, your favorite time of year: National Cybersecurity Awareness Month!
While ITS works year-round to educate the entire WCM community on keeping their data safe, October marks a national collaborative initiative between government and industry to give you the resources you need to maintain your security online.
We’ll be spending the month offering handy tips from our experts, but first thing’s first:
How well do you know what’s going on in the world of cybersecurity?
From ChatGPT, to Twitter (or X?) losing its security and privacy teams, cybersecurity affects you in more ways than you think. How are you doing when it comes to knowing how to protect your data? Let’s find out!
As in previous years, our official Cybersecurity Awareness Month quiz will be open to all WCM faculty, staff, and students. You have until Friday, Oct. 20 to answer 10 questions. The winners with the highest scores in the fastest time will win a fabulous prize from The Cornell Store!
This week’s tip: PHI/PII in Subject Lines
Our community handles sensitive information on a daily basis and ITS offers several services to help share this data when needed.
If you have a large file to send to colleagues internal or external to WCM, you can always use our File Transfer service to securely attach up to 35GB. We also have our handy #encrypt service that you can use in email subject lines to protect sensitive data in the body of the email. However, you can’t use both services simultaneously. #encrypt will not work on any messages sent via File Transfer.
Regardless of how you choose to safeguard your messages, it’s important to note that it’s best not to include any Protected Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in email subject lines. Subject lines are not encrypted, so any included PHI and PII, like Social Security Numbers or Medical Record Numbers (MRNs), are prohibited since subject lines are viewable to anyone. Keep the subject line generic and encrypt the details within your email using one of these services.