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Frequently Asked Questions about Global Security WeekDo you have a question about Global Security Week (GSW)? We will do our best to respond to all questions directly but many are hopefully answered right here. Please contact us if you have questions about GSW or if you can provide better answers to the questions shown below - we certainly do not claim to have all the answers ourselves.
FAQ quick links:
When is GSW?Q: “When you say the ‘week leading up to September 11th’, when do you mean, exactly? A: Over the next five years, GSW will take place on:
All these dates are inclusive i.e. the first and last dates shown are part of GSW, but clearly it is up to the organizers of individual awareness events to decide exactly when to hold their events. Some may choose to hold awareness days, weeks or even entire months but to take advantage of the GSW publicity they should at least be near to GSW! GSW is not a one-off event so even if you didn’t have time to get involved this year, there’s always next year or the year after. Plenty of forward notice means there’s no excuse for not planning. There are numerous security awareness events at other times of the year too - check the calendar for details. Over time, some of them will move to coincide with GSW, others will remain where they are. Either way, that’s cool. The real point is that security awareness activities take place and are promoted as widely as possible.
Q: “Why did you pick ‘the week leading up to September 11th’ specifically? A: We could have picked any date but we chose that specific week for several good reasons: September 11th has had a special significance for global security ever since the dramatic events of 2001. We are not making a political statement by associating with 9/11, merely capitalizing on widespread (essentially worldwide) media interest in security at that time. We picked a period shortly before September 11th rather than the 11th itself because media coverage tends to build to a climax on the 11th and decays rapidly afterwards. People soon lose interest after the main event. Furthermore, most media coverage of security issues is very clearly focused on remembering the Twin Towers, and hence physical security and terrorism aspects, on September 11th. We wanted to broaden the appeal of GSW to include other aspects of security such as information security and personal security. We picked a whole week, not a single day, to give participants in GSW the flexibility to respond to organizational and cultural norms. A single date, say September 10th would have fallen on a different day in successive years, sometimes at the weekend. Whilst we understand, for example, that many South Americans prefer to celebrate even work-related events at the weekend, whereas most other cultures would prefer to stick to the working week (which itself varies from country to country). We are not necessarily suggesting that participants should spend the whole week promoting security awareness, nor that they should only do so during GSW. Security awareness is ideally a 24x365 activity but GSW is just a focal point we can all share.
How can I get involved?Q: How can I get involved in GSW? A: To join with us and participate in GSW please get in touch with the happy band of volunteers running this website and leading the GSW campaign. If you already run, or are thinking of running, security awareness activities, we welcome your involvement simply by planning to hold those activities during GSW. You might like to organize a mini-event during GSW to promote your activities and participate in GSW even if the main event is at some other time of year. We encourage you to link your events to the global campaign using the promotional images if you wish. If you tell us about them, we will gladly promote your GSW activities on this website completely free of charge. GSW is a not-for-profit volunteer project, not a commercial money-making initiative. We are not after your money! We cannot accept commercial sponsorship or advertising or even ‘donations’ with strings attached. If you really want to help, please consider volunteering your services on the organizing committee, or contributing some funds to swell our miniscule marketing budget. We are particularly keen at this point to hear from security and marketing professionals with media and industry contacts in the security business, and especially security awareness professionals with practical experience of running large-scale awareness campaigns. Please contact us to volunteer for GSW.
What’s in it for you?Q: “Why are you promoting GSW? What’s in it for you?” A: A fair question, easily answered. We came up with GSW as a way to pull together security awareness activities which have hitherto been uncoordinated and disjointed. All sorts of well-meaning public and private bodies, government and commercial organizations, community groups and even lone security professionals hold ‘security days’, ‘security weeks’ and similar events but very few of them coincide in time. Aligning these activities in the week leading up to September 11th annually increases the amount of media exposure, feeding off the existing media interest in security during that particular week and leveraging all the separate awareness activities as one. What’s in it for us can be explained by reference to a telling comment from Adel Melek, the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu partner behind their latest Global Security Survey: “Despite geographic, social and cultural differences, we have a common goal: to protect the information that is the lifeblood of our businesses”. Many of you reading this are probably as dependent on the Internet as we are, and no doubt suffer as much from viruses, spam, hackers and all the other security threats circulating on and exploiting the IT infrastructure we all share. We have an interest in encouraging you to secure your systems, to prevent them being used by spammers, fraudsters and hackers, just as you depend on us. You might even say that your security is our business (and vice versa).
What shall we do?
Posters and trinketsQ: “Are there GSW posters available or downloadable?” A: Yes indeed. See the freebies page.
Q: “I think the collective approach would be a great idea to come up with some ideas/suggestions for events nationwide! One immediate thought is: come up with one or two awareness trinkets. As many Departments and Agencies that have funds available for this, could purchase same trinket(s) for as many employees and their onsite contractors. I imagine joint purchase could somehow be made to ensure best possible price.” [Cassandra from USA] A: There are loads of possible trinkets and prices are OK for a large enough order (many of them require a minimum of 500 items and only start to be economic if you buy thousands). Perhaps any trinket suppliers reading this would care to comment? I'm sure we could brainstorm and come up with some catchy phrases to accompany "Global Security Week" ... ideas anyone?
Obtaining funding for GSW initiativesQ: “My strategy starts with my organisation - the state IT agency. It will be easy if I can win the support and confidence of my management then they will help me sell the awareness throughout the government. Can you please help me with the strategy to get funding on this?”. [Sam from South Africa] A: Sam, I come from a commercial rather than governmental background so I am not ideally situated to respond to your question, I’m afraid. In the commercial world, at least, the way to get funding for anything is to persuade management that it has value to the organization, in other words laying out a cost-benefit analysis. I would therefore suggest working out (a) the benefits to your nation arising from increased public awareness of security issues (such as a small reduction in fraud/theft losses, perhaps a small fraction of a percent of the GDP?) as well as (b) the estimated costs of promoting the campaign. If (a) is much greater than (b), it should be a push-over!
Security awareness info for kids
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