Today was makeITsecure day 2005. There was a lot of activity including a 600k booklet drop through the national press, a ministerial briefing with the CEOs of the organisations involved and decent amout of PR activity and news pickup. We also had around 70 Microsoft and Dell security ambassadors out on the streets passing out guidance booklets and advice to anyone who needed any. I was pretty happy with the way the campaign has been received.

Bizarrely, somebody sent me a copy of a discussion thread examining why we don't have any references to the firefox browser on the site and why we appear to be dissing p2p music share sites. The general consensus being that because some of the sponsors are big corporates, we're trying to push people towards our own products. The reality is that we talk about web browsers in general and the only instance where we mention Internet Explorer is in explaining how to change the security settings. A lot of P2P file share sites are rife with spyware and that's a simple fact of life. The idea behind the campaign is to provide awareness and advice to non-technical people about what the threats are and how to mitigate them. Over the past months, we've had 48,000 page views to the site by 18,000 unique users....somebody finds this stuff useful! Of course we could have just done nothing at all.......