Volunteer professionals to help charities with their online security
Howard Lake | 21 October 2014 | News
Give A Day is a new initiative that encourages digital security staff to volunteer their time to help charities develop and preserve their online security. As the name suggest, the campaign invites these skilled staff to donate just one day of their time.
As they point out, charities hold data on three out of four Britons, so the scale of the challenge of protecting all this data is considerable.
Give A Day has already secured support from commercial online security specialists and companies, including people working at Badenoch & Clark, HMRC and Aviva. Andrzej Kawalec, CTO at HP Security, sent a message of support for the platform’s launch event:
[youtube height=”450″ width=”800″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4DqwZah0Ck[/youtube]
Amar Singh, Founder and CEO, said:
“Almost every charity is custodian of extremely sensitive personal information ranging from sex abuse and child abuse to health issues like cancer, mental illness and diabetes.
“The problem is, in cyberspace, most, if not all charities have this immensely personal and sensitive information exposed and often inadequately protected, making them an easy target for the cyber attacker”.
He cited the example of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), “where an opportunist attacker stole sensitive information about couples and their pregnancy issues”.
Singh added:
Advertisement
“The charity did not even know they had all this personal information and were fined £250,000 by the ICO”.
Although still in beta, Give A Day is already inviting registrations and enquiries from digital security staff, charities and potential corporate supporters.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.