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Summer is the perfect time to start planning for National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). We invite every institution to help EDUCAUSE and NCSA make this October the most successful NCSAM celebration since the campaign started 10 years ago.

But wait! Don't start from scratch. We've gathered resources that can be adapted by your campus.

IAM Online, the monthly webinar series sponsored by InCommon, Internet2, and EDUCAUSE, has scheduled a special series of virtual working group meetings, May 20–21, 2013, to showcase key identity and access management (IAM) tools and services. During these "open house" meetings, working group members will share background information and provide overviews for current identity-related projects and programs, as well as host interactive discussions about current work and plans for the future. Hear how your campus can benefit, and find out how to get involved.

Join one or join them all—there is no charge for any of the sessions!

Monday, May 20 (all times Eastern):

Rather than waiting for a data breach to happen, consider using an incident checklist to establish a campus incident response team, review your institution's readiness, and develop (or adjust) your incident management and response roadmap. In a recent Security listserv discussion, one campus was seeking an incident response decision tree or process flow to help determine when it's appropriate to perform forensic analysis of a compromised machine that accesses or stores sensitive data.

Nine winners of the 5th Annual Information Security Awareness Video and Poster Contest have been selected. The winning videos and posters are now available for colleges and universities to use in campus security awareness campaigns during National Cyber Security Awareness Month in October, student orientations, and throughout the year.

The Internet2 Scalable Privacy Project (ScalePriv), funded with the recent National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) grant to Internet2, is seeking campuses to participate in the Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cohortium*. Applications are open until April 26, 2013 (note the deadline extension).

Security, privacy, and IT professionals from the higher education community will gather in St. Louis next month (April 15-17) for the 2013 Security Professionals Conference. This year's program features several new offerings for face-to-face and online attendees:

Communicating information security issues with campus researchers is a common challenge in the higher education community. Often, researchers may not see information security or data protection as their concern. A new HEISC resource, Top Information Security Concerns for Researchers: Protecting Your Intellectual Assets, provides 10 sets of questions for researchers to consider about their data while also offering relevant resources for protecting that research data.

Questions or comments about this resource? Please contact us: security-council@educause.edu.

Although this is only the second year that colleges and universities are working together to observe and promote Data Privacy Month, many campuses are busy planning local or regional events, tweeting daily with the hashtags #dataprivacy and #dpd13, and writing blogs or articles about data privacy. We hope these activities will encourage you to consider ways to promote Data Privacy Month this year or begin thinking about how yor campus will participate in 2014.

Data Privacy Month is an annual effort to empower people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint, as well as escalate the protection of privacy and data as everyone's priority. Spend the month helping to ensure your campus community is respecting privacy, safeguarding data, and enabling trust. This year’s Data Privacy Month Planning Task Force has selected weekly themes for the higher education community to focus on. Several free webinars will also be offered throughout the month of January.

Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) – December 9-15, 2012 – is a call to action to share information and offer activities that will advocate for computing and elevate computer science education for students at all levels. EDUCAUSE is supporting CSEdWeek because computer science is an important part of information technology, the mechanism our community uses to support the advancement of higher education.

Everyone can participate, and as members of the higher education IT community, we invite you to help lead the charge. Below are a few easy ways to participate.