Coronavirus: Online webinars teaching digital skills

The Coronavirus pandemic is presenting new cyber security challenges to charities of all sizes, but working from home means there’s no opportunity to attend security training events.

The good news is that there are plenty of valuable free-to-view security webinars available online which you can take advantage of to improve your digital skills and help keep your charity safe while the lockdown continues.

Here are five of the best security webinars covering a wide range of digital skills and suitable for everyone from security novices to experienced IT professionals.

1,) A Beginner’s Guide to Cyber Security

This training webinar is ideal for anyone who is interested in cyber security but who has had no previous specialist training. Hosted by Sadia Anwar from cyber security firm PlanB Consulting, the webinar looks at the purpose of cyber security measures, the preparations that organizations including charities should have in place in case they are attacked by cyber criminals, and what to do if they fall victim to a cyber attack.

The webinar also looks at who cyber criminals are and how they go about attacking IT systems, what the impact of a successful attack can be, and how to mitigate some of the risks of cyber attacks through specialist cyber insurance.

2.) The Little Password That Could: How a Reused Password Could Vaporize Your Enterprise

Almost all of us are aware that you shouldn’t use the same password for every website, service or account that you use, and most of us know that the most secure passwords are ones which are hard to guess: ideally they should be made up of a long random sequence of characters, digits, and special characters. But in this fascinating webinar, Paula Januszkiewicz, cybersecurity expert, penetration tester, and chief executive of CQURE, shows how cyber criminals can get around even the most secure of passwords.

The trick, she explains, is to take advantage of the information that many people reveal about themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other places around the web, and to use that information to bypass existing passwords completely.

The second half of the webinar becomes extremely technical and deals with the perils or password reuse, but for security novices Januszkiewicz’s presentation is worth watching for the first half alone.

3.) Protecting Against Ransomware

Ransomware is a huge threat to charities because it is all to easy for cyber criminals to infect computers using phishing emails, and because an infection can be catastrophic. With vital databases unavailable, charities face an extended period of service interruption, and in the most extreme cases the organisation may be forced to make a choice between closing down altogether and paying a hefty ransom fee to the cyber criminals – with no guarantee that doing so will help them regain access to their data.

In this essential digital skills webinar, recorded at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, four security experts look at the lessons that can be learned from some of the biggest ransomware attacks to date and the measures that some organisations are taking to protect themselves for the future. These measures include backups, patches, and other ways to protect data.