The GetSafeOnline tour is coming to a City near you very if you're in the UK

Tony Blair kicked off the Get Safe Online campaign at a press launch in London this morning. Microsoft in partnership with the UK Government and a many large companies are evangelising the importance of information security to the entire UK population - at least those who watch TV, read the major newspapers, and visit shopping centres.

We have a fleet of ten identical Minis which are branded with the logos of all partners. The team comprising security experts will tour around the UK for two weeks visiting twelve cities to spread the word as to both the risks and simple steps we can all take to mitigate them. I'll share more details as we go including the interesting questions I get asked. I'm the technical lead for Microsoft in this campaign and I was tasked with amongst other things putting together demos that would make sense to anyone (my Grand Mother included) to encourage personal responsibility when surfing the Internet - that was particularly difficult and avoiding jargon and complexity is harder than I'd thought.

You can help (even if you're outside the UK) by getting your friends and family to browse to the GetSafeOnline Website to learn how to protect themselves. The core message is "Keep up to date with patches", "Install and keep your anti-virus up to date", "Install / enable a personal firewall" and use "electronic common sense" - in other words question things online as if they were physical - if something seems too good to be true THEN IT PROBABLY IS!