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Commonwealth of Virginia Innovative Technology Symposium

Citizen Cyber Security

Best Cyber Security Initiative

York County
Timothy Wyatt, Deputy IT Director

https://www.yorkcounty.gov/cyber

Governments go through great lengths to safeguard citizen's information such as PII, HIPAA, tax, and much more. However, if criminals can easily get this information directly from the citizens themselves, what's the point? Any effective security strategy must take into consideration everyone and all devices involved, including citizens. To this end, a critical task must be educating and equipping them with strategies they can implement without being an IT expert.

York County's Citizen Cyber Security initiative is designed to educate the community of the dangers of the Internet and how to easily protect themselves from most cyber threats. The initiative accomplishes this through a three phase approach.

The first step is to engage the citizens with an in-person presentation to make them aware of the various risks and how to reduce them in a broad sense. The second step is an informal question and answer session where citizens can ask how the prior guidance applies to their devices and lifestyles. The final step is access to an on-line repository of the exact steps needed to protect themselves, delivered in a non-technical format.

The original plan was to deliver the Personal Cyber Security presentation at 3 sessions to at least 15 attendees. Over 9 months, it has been delivered in 9 sessions to over a total of 275 people.

The overhead of this initiative was extremely small and consisted of creating online documentation and a single presentation that could be delivered at different locations. The community response has been overwhelming.

The current overall average follow-up survey rating by attendees is 4.9 out of a possible 5. Over 80% of the attendees listed that they would choose to attend a Personal Cyber Security presentation. 75% of the attendees were 55 years or older, so the primary target audience is also being effectively reached.


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