As technology advances, what are you doing to protect yourself from online threat actors and malicious ransomware attacks? We are more and more connected every day — from messaging family and friends, shopping online or ordering supplies for our small businesses! It’s important that we all take steps to stay safe when using our phones, laptops and smart devices.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is dedicated to ensuring secure and resilient critical infrastructure across the “Show-Me State.” We provide practical and impactful cybersecurity awareness actions that individuals can implement to strengthen their cyber defenses and protect themselves online.

CISA is committed to improving cybersecurity behaviors and enhancing protection across Missouri. By fostering partnerships among government agencies, businesses, industry leaders and cybersecurity experts, CISA ensures everyone has access to up-to-date resources to mitigate risks and strengthen defenses against cyber threats.

For our agency, cybersecurity awareness is an ongoing, year-round discussion. We highlight four simple actions that would make yourself, your family and your business exponentially more secure:

• Use strong passwords, meaning long, random and unique to each account. Use a password manager to generate them and save them if possible.
• Enable multifactor authentication on all accounts. We need more than a password on our most important accounts, like email, social media and financial accounts.
• Recognize and report phishing, or as we like to say, think before you click. Be cautious of unsolicited emails, texts or calls asking you for personal information. Resist the urge to click on unknown links or open attachments from unknown sources.
• Update software regularly. In fact, enable automatic software updates on all devices so the latest security patches are continuously up to date.

Online criminals look for easy targets, like people who don’t take base precautions. CISA offers a diverse range of helpful products tailored to address your cybersecurity needs that includes select cybersecurity resources in multiple languages.