October 2020 – SWITCH Security-Blog

GÉANT and Cyber Security Month with Security awareness at the Paul Scherrer Institute

Cyber Security Month with GÉANT – “Become a cyber hero”

The European data network for the research and education community GÉANT interconnects national research and education networks (NRENs) like SWITCH across Europe, enabling collaboration virtually and accelerate research, drive innovation and enrich education.

Also this year GÉANT joins the European Cyber Security Month, an initiative launched by ENISA, EC DG CONNECT and a variety of partners, to raise security awareness within the European community. With the tagline «Become a cyber hero» GÉANT publishes practical tips, case studies and articles on social engineering, phishing, password security and ransomware throughout October. The content is provided by experts within the community.

SWITCH-CERT is proud to share with you one of the interesting contributions from the Swiss NREN. Read about Björn Abt, IT Security Officer at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), talking about their approach to security awareness:

The September/October 2020 issue of our SWITCH Security Report is available!

Dear Reader!

A new issue of our bi-monthly SWITCH Security Report is available!

The topics covered in this report are:

Ransomware – the new normal of digital extortion
A murky supply chain – how hackers profited from Cumulus data
Smisherman’s Friends – a new wave of smishing attacks is washing over Europe and Switzerland

The Security Report is available in both English and German.

»» Download the English report. »» Download the German report.

Growing support for open security standards in Switzerland

Open security standards are essential for a secure and resilient Internet in Switzerland and protect the privacy of Swiss Internet users. The adoption rate for Internet security standards like DNSSEC, DANE and DMARC in Switzerland is still low compared to the leading countries in Europe, but there is more and more support from the Internet industry, authorities and not for profit organizations in Switzerland.

Why are open security standards so important?

The implementation of open security standards that come out of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), reduce the attack surface of the domain/service owner. But even more important, a growing implementation rate reduces the attack surface of the internet as a whole and makes the life of cyber criminals and state actors more challenging. Open security standards provide different mechanisms to secure our communication on the internet, most important encryption and authentication. Encryption keeps our communication on the internet confidential and prevents third parties from reading our emails and tracking on which web sites users spend their time. Authentication allows us to identify and authenticate our communications partners, it makes sure that we are not on a fake website or send emails or our login credentials to a rogue email server. Continue reading “Growing support for open security standards in Switzerland”