Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Be Cybersmart and Take the Challenge!
2025 marks the 22nd annual Cybersecurity Awareness Month. To celebrate, Elon is launching a Cybersecurity Awareness Challenge for our students, staff, and faculty. This challenge reminds and encourages all of us to take 4 simple steps to help minimize our risk of unauthorized data access and personal identity theft.
- Use strong passwords and a password management tool. Strong passwords are critical to protecting data.
- Use multifactor authentication (MFA): You need more than a password to protect your online accounts; enabling MFA, where available, makes you significantly less likely to get hacked.
- Recognize & report phishing: Phishing emails, texts, and calls are the number one way data gets compromised. Be cautious of unsolicited emails, texts, or calls and avoid sharing sensitive information or credentials over the phone or email.
- Update software: Ensuring your personal software is up to date is the best way to protect your personal technology. Regularly check manually for updates if automatic updates are not available and keep operating systems, antivirus software, web browsers, and applications up to date.
To help keep these 4 basic principles top-of-mind, we created a Cybersecurity Awareness Challenge to celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This year’s theme emphasizes being personally responsible and enforces the importance of taking proactive steps to enhance cybersecurity wherever you go. This challenge will begin October 01, 2025. To complete the challenge, log into your Moodle Account and select the 2025 Cybsecurity Awareness Challenge. If you are an Elon employee and you complete all 5 challenges by October 31, you will be entered in a drawing for a $50 Elon book store gift card and you will satisfy your 2025-2026 security awareness training requirement. If you are a student and complete all 5 challenges by October 31, you will also be entered in a drawing for a $50 Elon book store gift card.
Let’s all do our part to make Elon University more cyber secure.