We were recently travelling to faraway lands, doing meet and greets with gov partners, when one of them posed an interesting idea:
What if people from our part of the world could see a link through to our local resource on data breaches provided by the gov?
Initially, I was sceptical, primarily because no matter where you are in the world, isn’t the guidance the same? Strong and unique passwords, turn on MFA, and so on and so forth. But our host explained the suggestion, which in retrospect made a lot of sense:
Showing people a local resource from a trusted government body has a gravitas that we believe would better support data breach victims.
And he was right. Not just about the significance of a government resource, but as we gave it more thought, all the other things that are specific to the local environment. Additional support resources. Avenues to report scams. Language! Like literally, presenting content in a way that normal everyday folks can understand it based on where they are in the world. And we have the mechanics to do this now as we’re already geo-targeting content on the breach pages courtesy of HIBP’s partner program.
Whilst we’re still working through the mechanics with the gov that initially came up with this suggestion, during a recent chat with our friends “across the ditch” at New Zealand’s National Cyber Security Centre, I mentioned the idea. They thought it was great, so we just did it 🙂 As of now, if you’re a Kiwi and you open up any one of the 899 breach pages (such as this one), you’ll see this advice off to the right of the screen:
That links off to a resource on their Own Your Online initiative, which aims to help everyday folks there protect themselves in cyberspace. There’s lots of good practical advice on the site along the lines I mentioned earlier, and even a suggestion to go and check out HIBP (which now links you back to the NZ NCSC…)
I’ll be reaching out to our other gov partners around the world and seeing what resources they have that we could integrate, hopefully it’s just one more little step in the right direction to protect the masses from online nasties.