The government said Monday it has decided to designate July as "Information Protection Month" and the second Wednesday of the same month as "Information Protection Day" as part of its campaign to promote public awareness of cyber security. The move comes almost three years after a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on July 7, 2009 paralyzed 22 government-run and private Web sites, three times over three days. The attack blocked access to the sites and caused hard disk damage to some personal computers. The Ministry of Public Administration and Security and seven other government agencies will jointly hold nationwide campaigns during the month-long event in hopes of preventing cyber crimes and making information protection a part of people's everyday life. On July 11, the government will celebrate the first Information Protection Day, while events such as international conferences on information protection, job fairs for the information security industry and anti-hacking competitions will be held throughout the month.