For the last couple of years, Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has released a series of blog posts for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The theme for this month from the National Cyber Security Alliance is "Our Shared Responsibility." The Department of Homeland Security is running a series on this theme, as are many other private organizations.

Our action and inaction have consequences for systems and services used by us, our friends, and our places of employment. Attackers use accounts compromised due to poor passwords and lack of two-factor authentication to launch other attacks on users connected to those accounts. End-user systems infected with malicious software are leveraged to conduct distributed denial of service attacks against financial and government websites. Users who fall victim to spear phishing attacks open the door for attackers to leap frog their way through sensitive networks and collect proprietary information from our places of employment.

Security is our shared responsibility. Over the course of the next few weeks, Cisco Security Intelligence Operations hopes to raise awareness of practical ways everyone can help secure their systems and improve overall security. We will publish posts covering wide-ranging topics such as safe web browsing, securing mobile devices, protecting against data exfiltration, and more. You can follow the tag "ncsam-2013" to view the blog posts related to this topic.

Our efforts are not only for the month of October. You should view our our weekly Cyber Risk Report, covering the events that are significant to cybersecurity issues over the past week. Every day new threat and vulnerability information is published on the Cisco SIO portal. Moreover, there are always in-depth technical whitepapers available on a variety of topics.

Check back later this week for our first posts for National Cyber Security Awareness Month 2013!