A very important and worthwhile InSafe initiative starts today. Dubbed 'Safer Internet Day', the initiative is designed to raise awareness of cyber threats. The target audience in this case, however, isn't the corporate IT-type, but users, specifically targeting parents and children.

This year's Safer Internet Day attempts to ride on the coattails of success of blogging and will distribute its message using exactly the same vehicle.
Comments from special guests and site visitors about safe blogging will be collected and posted over the next 24 hours at:
http://www.saferinternet.org/ww/en/pub/insafe/index.htm

While any properly-managed event that raises awareness of internet security threats is a good thing, and has my full support, I'd like to stress that internet security requires users to be on their guard every day of the year. As RUNET statistics indicate, internet scams have nearly doubled since December, 2005, when fraudulent schemes were detected in 10% of filtered spam-traffic. Today that number is close to 22%.

These numbers give a clear indication of the size of the problem. So is it a Safer Internet or not? Maybe we should rename this day Unsafer Internet Day?