The ISAF, which celebrates its second birthday this month, was born out of the ISSA-UK Advisory Board and is a cross-industry initiative set up to raise awareness of information security.
According to the forum, many of its member organisations will be working on awareness activities in the schedule, so magnifying the message.
The forum says that, like insurance, information security tends to be interesting only to people when something bad happens. Despite this, the industry association – which has more than 20 members – claims it is quite easy to take simple steps to reduce the likelihood of the security victim being you.
David King, the ISAF's chairperson, said that the calendar will help the member organisations and others in the industry co-ordinate their awareness activities around specific themes.
"This increased focus will help create opportunities for partnership and assist in planning and collaboration to raise awareness of good security practices", he said.
King's comments were echoed by Jim Norton, chairperson of the IET IT Policy Panel, who said he welcomed the initiative.
"Creative use of information communications technology continues to bring great benefits to our Society, but every silver lining has a dark cloud", he said. "It is vital that we continue to raise awareness of the risks involved and I commend ISAF's comprehensive approach to this", he added.
John Colley, managing director of (ISC)2 EMEA, said that, as founding members of the ISAF, (ISC)2 welcomes this initiative.
"Too often awareness is ineffective due to the fact that too many messages are being communicated to too many people. By focusing on specific issues each month, the calendar provides a means to deliver these important messages to the people that really need to understand them", he said.
The campaign kicked off last month with a social engineering and phishing theme, followed by mobile device security this month and child protection plus online ID security in March.
The programme continues in April with a general security awareness theme and, in May, the focus will be security compliance and the law, followed by identity protection in June and convergence/physical protection issues in July.
When August comes around, the ISAF theme of risk management and how to assess online dangers, followed by the September theme of business continuity and backups, segueing into corporate governance in October, and crime in November.
And the monthly themes are rounded out in December with malware being the topic of discussion.
Malicious software, says the forum, is a constant threat on the internet and installs itself on a victim's computer and then undertakes some unwanted action, without the victim's consent.