Cybersecurity Awareness Month is an international initiative aimed at educating individuals, businesses and institutions about online safety and encouraging them to protect their data from cybercrime.
Poland's military is one of the institutions heavily engaged in advancing cybersecurity.
In recent weeks, the country's Cyberspace Defence Forces Command has shared basic cybersecurity advice on its social media profiles and invited journalists to participate in specialist training on the subject.
Radio Poland's Marcin Matuszewski has the details.
Click on the audio player above to listen.
In the first half of 2024 alone, over 400,000 cyber-crime incidents were recorded in Poland - which already exceeds the number of such events from the entire year 2023. The spokesman for the Polish cybersecurity forces, Lieutenant Colonel Przemysław Lipczyński, told Polish Radio's news agency IAR that everyone can and should be involved in the country's online security. "The most important thing is vigilance and awareness of threats" - he emphasised, reminding that cybercriminals most often want to lull our vigilance and steal our data - to create an entry point for inflicting further damage.
Phishing operations are the most common here - in which the cybercriminals send links confusingly similar to bank websites, or seemingly normal e-mail messages (think: delivery service, energy company, and such) that actually contain dangerous links. "So remember - never click suspicious links if you are not 100% sure about them" - Lieutenant Colonel Przemysław Lipczyński added.
Sometimes such data-stealing committed through phishing is simply aimed at cyber-robbery, but it is also a method used for gaining "compromats" and blackmailing people into doing the cybercriminals' bidding - foreign services included. One such attack coming from Belarus and aimed at Polish state agencies happened in early September, but it was discovered and curbed in time. However - this clearly shows that the threat is very much real.
Cybersecurity awareness also means knowledge about the disinformation that has been used very intensively in recent years. Such actions are initiated by Russia, among others, and are intended to cause chaos in a given country. Representatives of the Polish government, but also the Polish army, pay special attention to this aspect - and strongly appeal for caution when reading information posted on the Internet, especially the sensationalist headlines.
Colonel Przemysław Lipczyński reminds that the scale of these disinformation actions is enormous. Their main goal is to influence the views and decisions of the country attacked in this way. Often, "fake" actions are built on partially true data, which is intended to make a given message credible and mislead recipients. One such example in Poland are the recent post-flood reports, also passed on by a number of right-wing politicians - heavily exaggerating the number of victims to diminish the government's outlook, or trying to use the flood to incite hate against Ukrainians in Poland by falsely painting them as looters.
"The basis for behaviour on the Internet should be limited trust in what we read - expressed through fact-checking, checking the sources of presented information or news, as well as cross-checking between different media to make sure if what we read is actually true. It is also worth considering to use only well-established, verified news websites, and to follow the trustworthy fact-checking institutions' profiles" - Lieutenant Colonel Przemysław Lipczyński concluded.
The Polish Scientific and Academic Computer Network agency (NASK), which tracks threats on the web in the country, appeals to report all suspicious events in cyberspace. All information on what to watch out for - and how to report it - can be found on the website of this institution - available in both Polish and English.
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Source: IAR
Radio Poland's Marcin Matuszewski has the details in his audio report - available in our player (red button above and on the left).