A Creative and Inspiring Cybersec Month with Xopero Software

They say hard times create strong men. And creative challenges? Resourceful IT admins!

At the beginning of October, traditionally celebrated as Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we invited you to learn together through play. Four different challenges, codenamed Mission: Cybersafe, attracted a decent crowd of IT specialists eager to compete for creativity and ingenuity, while showing off their cybersec expertise.

The results exceeded our expectations. Just see for yourselves!

Challenge 1: An Admin-Marketer Creates a Catchy Slogan

In the first week of the contest, we asked participants to find a word in a word puzzle and use it to create a slogan related to cybersecurity. What?! Slogans are marketers’ domain, aren’t they? Not at all! Flashing LEDs and the hum of servers can apparently be a great source of inspiration.

Our Xopero Software jury was most charmed by the ‘call’ for understanding for stressed and overworked admins:

“Recovery – because every admin deserves a second chance.”

Simple yet evoking positive emotions—just like a perfectly crafted social campaign. However, there were more interesting ideas in store for us:

• “Backup today, peace of mind tomorrow.”—The voice of reason opposing the Southern “mañana” or… English “Let’s just wing it.”
• “ENCRYPTION—the silent guardian of your data.” —Here, the slogan is not only creative but also professional!

OK then, maybe these IT guys aren’t such gloomy and hopelessly dull folks after all?

Challenge 2: Ransomware Doesn’t Affect Us: Debunking IT Sec Myths

Every field of life has its myths or “urban legends.” The same goes for cybersecurity, where clinging to false beliefs can have disastrous consequences. In the second week of October, we asked contestants to share myths they’ve heard from clients, industry friends, and others.

In this competition, we were impressed by a ‘scholarly’ set of classical cyber myths:

You can learn quite a lot, right?! But that’s not the end of the interesting quotes:

• “Having remote desktops on a single production server is a backup. Because if a disk of a computer fails, everything is on the server, right?”—Well, it must have been a great surprise after a failure.
• “Ransomware doesn’t affect us because we are not a large company.”—That’s some twisted logic, isn’t it?

Looking at the last example, one could ironically say, “Ignorance is bliss.” Unfortunately, such a peace of mind is usually short-lived. Or rather, it lasts until something happens that shakes the entire organization. In the end, it’s probably better to have a plan B(ackup).

Challenge 3: Tales from the Cryp… or the Server Room

And what if something’s already happened? For sure, it’s not a happy moment. But it can be funny when we recall or tell such an experience as an anecdote with the benefit of hindsight.

Therefore, as a part of the challenge no. 3, we encouraged contestants—partly for fun and partly to build cyber awareness—to share these types of stories, both firsthand and third-party accounts.

When it comes to the 3rd challenge, we were captivated by the story of a certain programmer who, at the beginning of their professional career, deleted the production database instead of a test one. A true ‘cyber baptism by fire.’ You can see (or read) it for yourselves here.

The lack of an appropriate backup and data recovery solution was also the root cause of other stories we received:

• “[There was no] backup for data hosted in the OVH Cloud, which is why in 2021, data of many clients literally went up in smoke, including working copies, backups of client data, personal data, accounting data. Some businesses simply ceased to exist. All it would have taken to prevent would be choosing a slightly more expensive subscription with a backup in a different location—just to be able to restore data from a backup located elsewhere than the fire-stricken data center.”
• “[Let’s imagine] school computer labs, or rather, servers with AD and class management software. As is often the case at schools, the servers had been standing for several years and a power failure completely destroyed their disks at some point 🙁. Fortunately, it turned out that one of the IT specialists had made a full server backup for testing purposes and restored it on their machine as a virtual instance. After buying new disks for the servers, it turned out that the licenses for the lab software support had long expired 😃, and the new ones didn’t work on older Windows 😉. Putting out the non-functional labs fire 🧯 for the beginning of the school year required restoring the systems from the only virtual copy. Unfortunately, student data vanished, or rather, was outdated, because it contained the state from the moment the virtual machine was created for the test. Nevertheless, it saved education 😉.”

As you can see, a proper backup—both in its basic dimension (regular copies, copy testing) and the more sophisticated one (replication, the 3-2-1 rule)—is a necessity if you want to avoid immense stress for yourself and a lot of problems for your organization.

Challenge 4: Tell Me ‘Bout Them Compooters Ya Got, Steve

The work of IT specialists, our contestants, is often perceived as “Amazonian black magic” by many people. That’s why, for the final trial (of tears), we asked them to explain to a layperson what they actually do. But to keep it from being too simple, the explanation could not contain the word “IT” or the name of the department or position.

In this category, we appreciated the factual and comprehensive statement that exhausted the topic just in 3 sentences:

“I design and maintain a secure infrastructure for conducting remote training on educational platforms based on open-source software. I protect digital data transmission by configuring edge devices and data link layer devices. I conduct continuous security monitoring using Security Information and Event Management systems to detect and analyze incidents.”

Each IT specialist approached the topic in their own way. Some followed the principle of maximum brevity, while others, quite the opposite, let their linguistic imagination run wild:

• “At work, when answering the phone, I start the sentence with: ‘… but it works for me’.”
• “1. I turn curiosity into skill. I show that clicking can lead to discoveries, not just ads. I teach people to make friends with technology before it starts to fear them.
  2. I help residents of small towns grab the Internet by the horns and make it work for them, not against them. Sometimes all it takes is a little courage, a keyboard’s click, and just a hint of magic trick. (…)”

Different people, different descriptions, different ways to explain what they do every day.

A Month So Fine, We’ll Cherish It for All Time

Seeing your engagement and reading genuinely insightful and often inspiring responses, we had a really great time. What’s important, this was fun combined with learning through the experiences of real practitioners.

Thank you all for your initiative, ingenuity, and contribution to the development of cyber awareness!

One More Challenge? Complete the Survey and Help Fight Cyber Threats

Speaking of cyber awareness, we’d like to remind you once again about our survey for the upcoming report, “Cybersecurity Trends and Challenges 2025/2026.” The survey contains only closed questions, so it will not take longer than a few minutes, yet it can change so much.

If you haven’t participated yet, we strongly encourage you to fill it out. Your knowledge and experience are the most valuable contribution you can give to build higher cyber awareness among all of us and improve the overall level of cybersecurity. To participate, simply click this link or scan the QR code below:

We remind you that the survey is completely anonymous, and the answers will be used only in the form of collective analyses.