How can we get the general public thinking and doing something about security and their online presence? One way is to actually go out to where the general public actually are and engage with them in a way which strips away the techno babble and specialist vocabulary.
BEE SECURE is the part of an organisation called SMILE (Security Made In Lëtzebuerg) whose remit is to increase awareness of security in the digital field and promote safer internet practises for the general public (the other two branches are CASES which reaches out to business and CIRCL – the Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg, a government-driven initiative designed to provide a systematic response facility to computer security threats and incidents).
I’ve been working with BEE SECURE on the idea of Digital First Aid to be carried out at public events and possibly in schools, where BEE SECURE already carry out a lot of training.
So, the idea finally was to have a “Digital First Aid” post under the title of #BeeFirstAid where we are dressed as first responders and carry out a quick check on devices of members of the public. Like a medical centre, we have some posters about current issues, which are here on this page.
After carrying out the brief first aid, mainly on passwords, wifi permissions and cloud permissions, we give the “patient” a prescription (see image below) of things to carry out over the next week, and recommend that for further “treatment” they visit a Digital Privacy Salon and/or the local syn2cat hackerspace
