Month of Information Security

Although most people do not know (even I didn't until now), February was the "Month of Information Security" in Japan, sponsored by NISC (the National Information Security Center).

In other parts of the globe, a "Month of Security Awareness" (MoBB, MoPB, MoAB) means some extremely talented hacker guy (or girl?) in his free time releases +-30 zero day exploits and vuln. information for widely deployed systems that results in quite a strong message regarding the security claimed by the vendors and reality.

In Japan, a month of security awareness means that you have seminars all of the country where people dressed up in suits who know enough about computers to operate windows xp, outlook and office get together to talk about all of these scary security issues such as winny, botnets, viruses, keyloggers, etc... No, there are no zero days, no hands on training, or anything of that sort.

So with large organizations and millions of yen of tax money, how do we fight for better information security, you ask???

With this!

Yes, that's right. The "Information Security Rangers" will save the day! Right now they still do not have any reverse engineering, penetration testing, malware analysis, or networking skills but they can sing a cute song that informs the world about spam, viruses, firewalls and the monsters living in the internet trying to get your personal information!

You can check out the music video here. Hopefully this year it will win a pwnie for best song of 2009.


Although I feel much more aware of the dangers of computers and the internet thanks to that minute and a half song, security is a very serious issue and we really need one more layer of awareness if we really want to be certain that the entire public is fully concious of informaiton security issues.

So that is why METI (the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry) invested a heavy sum of tax money into creating CHECK PC!.

CHECK PC! is a site where Securina, two anime/doll like girls, teach you about the dangers of IT security such as phishing and viruses. They also have a music video here.

Although personally if I was in charge of the METI and had millions to spend on security awareness, I would probably prioritize marketing to a wider audience instead of just to Japanese girls age 6-9.
However, I suppose that is just as an important group that needs security education as much as everyone else.



Source:
http://slashdot.jp/askslashdot/09/02/26/1213200.shtml