Celebrate Data Privacy Week: Free privacy and security awareness resources

What used to be Data Privacy Day has now become an entire Data Privacy Week.

Why the expansion? The community hopes to bring additional awareness to data privacy and cybersecurity, which is sorely needed. Whether you're concerned about your own personal information or tasked with protecting an organization's entire store of sensitive data, cybercriminals and other nefarious actors want that data — and they've never had so much available for the taking.

What data are they after? It's another opportunity to share my favorite chart from a recent Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR).

Source: 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report

As the authors noted in previous reports, payment data has slowly declined as a target due to additional security controls and the rise of other tactics to monetize cybercrime, like extortion. Credentials remain extremely valuable as they are the primary initial steps of a data breach, along with phishing. 

Using stolen credentials is the top action taken during a breach, although ransomware is very close (for more on that, read our Ransomware Paper). But the authors also noted that the "percentage of breaches
caused by Error actions is rising." This rise "underlines the fact that even the most well-meaning employees can trigger a data breach simply by being careless."

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So what can you do to keep your credentials and other personal data safe from these actors? To start, get our free Data Privacy Toolkit. Infosec packaged up a few key items to share with your employees — or anyone!

Want more free resources? Here are a few of our most popular data privacy-related resources from the past few years. We encourage you to read, download, watch and share them with your family and peers.

1. Keep your personal data safe

Keeping your personal data safe starts with you. How much information are you exposing through social accounts and insecure phone settings? How deep is the potential treasure trove of old files stored on your devices? How does your cyber hygiene stack up against the criminals and bots trying to break into your accounts?

Download our free security awareness tip sheets for a quick playbook on staying cyber secure at work and home — from securing your home devices to understanding common phishing attacks and more.

See if you can take your biggest data privacy weakness (or a handful of them!) and turn it into a strength this year.

Download Tip Sheets

2. Keep your customers’ data safe

Cybersecurity is a team effort, and every employee has a part to play in protecting customer data. According to Osterman Research, 96% of security and IT leaders understand the importance of a strong cybersecurity culture, and that culture is often driven by security awareness training.

Learn more about building and optimizing a culture of cybersecurity with these free resources:

• See what successful programs are doing with this free ebook: Experts weigh in on developing effective security awareness training
• Get data on how security awareness leaders are changing culture: Security awareness outcomes with Infosec IQ
• Measure training ROI with this free tool: Security awareness ROI calculator

Need help getting started? Download our Recipe for Cybersecurity Toolkit we built for Cybersecurity Awareness Month. It includes a training module, assessment, posters, newsletter and more to help employees level up their skills around detecting cyber threats and keeping data safe.

Download Toolkit

3. Learn about data privacy careers

The demand for data privacy also creates a wide variety of career opportunities — from teaching data privacy best practices to implementing a data privacy program to building data privacy into applications.

On our Cyber Work Podcast, we regularly speak with privacy practitioners about their roles and which data privacy career path may be right for you. Last year we even held a Cyber Work Live with three privacy experts discussing career options.

Watch the full epidose

Here are other Cyber Work Podcast episodes you may enjoy:

• Unlocking data privacy: Insights from the data diva with Debbie Reynolds, also known as The Data Diva
• Revolutionizing digital identity, data privacy and data security with Raj Ananthanpillai, CEO of Trua
• Working as a privacy manager with Chris Stevens, privacy professional and Infosec Skills author

4. Build your data privacy skills

Lastly, if you're looking for technical training on implementing and managing a privacy program, check out our courses in Infosec Skills. You can learn directly from long-time data privacy practitioners, such as Ralph O'Brien, Chris Stevens, John Bandler, Starr McFarland — and more.

McFarland provides an overview of her Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) learning path below:

Browse Privacy Training

Stay safe!