Chapter 9: Cybersecurity at Home

I have dedicated most of my career to helping organizations protect what matters most to them. I would be remiss if I did not include some best practices for protecting those that matter most to you, your family and friends. Our children live in a very different world than the one we grew up in. During their formative years when they are developing their emotional systems and prone to making mistakes, they inhabit a world where they are judged against an impossible standard driven by social media, and their mistakes can be publicized and live forever. We must be vigilant if we want to protect our children.

Similarly, our parents are coping with a world that is very different from the one they are accustomed to. There are countless scams targeted at senior citizens around the world. While we do not need to make our parents cybersecurity experts, there are some best practices we can share with them to help them stay safe in an unfamiliar environment.

Cybersecurity in an organization is different from cybersecurity at home. However, there are some best practices that can help you and your family stay safe online. The threats are different. Unless you have an ultra-high net worth person in your family, it is unlikely that they will be targeted by a sophisticated actor. Truthfully, they're unlikely to be targeted at all, but rather fall victim to broad attacks designed to fool whoever they can. The good news is basic best practices can protect against many of those attacks. In this chapter, I will share some simple suggestions you can give to your family members to help them protect themselves.

This chapter is designed for you to share with everyone in your life who may not understand how to protect themselves online. Read it with children, parents, or significant others. The objective is to make the digital world a little bit safer for the people who matter most to you. Some of the information from other chapters will be repeated to give the proper context to people who may not have read the entire book. However, the concepts will be presented in less detail than they were in the other sections of the book.

The topics we will cover in this brief guide are as follows:

  • Protecting children and teaching them about online safety
  • Password managers, how to use them, and why they are important
  • Multifactor authentication
  • Password complexity and why it matters
  • Stop publishing your information!

Protecting children and teaching them about online safety

One of the topics I am most passionate about is protecting our children online. When I reflect on my childhood, I was able to come of age at a time where privacy still existed. I made mistakes as many children do, but my mistakes were not forever recorded on a social media server in a data center. The current generation of children does not have that luxury. Furthermore, they are subjected to unrealistic expectations of their appearance and accomplishments driven by social media, which can lead to them being bullied anonymously and constantly being reminded that they aren't good-looking enough or successful enough. Social media has connected people and done some good for society at large. However, there are few inventions in human history that have damaged the mental health of our children more than social media.

In my opinion, it is unlikely to be effective to forbid our children from using social media. Instead, we should equip them with the skills necessary to protect themselves from the dangers that lurk in cyberspace. It is difficult to impress upon children how long forever is and how the decisions they make now can negatively impact them in the future. It is also difficult to explain to them that what they see online is not real life, but rather a façade that the people they interact with want them to believe is real. Furthermore, it is difficult to bring ourselves to destroy our children's innocence by explaining to them that bad people exist and seek to exploit them. While each of these concepts is difficult, we cannot neglect our responsibility to educate our children. In the following sections, I will define each of these problems and provide some ideas for how parents can start the conversation. As always, it is important to ensure the message is age appropriate. However, in a world where toddlers have devices capable of connecting to the internet, it is never too early to start talking about online safety.

We will start with the permanence of social media.

The permanence of social media

There have been countless news stories that follow the same pattern:

  1. A prominent person posts something offensive on Twitter.
  2. A follower on Twitter takes a screenshot of the message.
  3. The prominent person deletes the offensive post.
  4. The screenshot is displayed on CNN or Fox News.
  5. The prominent person resigns, is fired, is canceled, and so on.

Careers and lives have been destroyed by people exercising poor judgment on social media. All those examples should serve as a reminder that once something is publicly shared, you can never really delete it. Some services, such as Snapchat, have been successful with younger generations primarily because they market themselves as temporary messages that go away forever after a short period of time. Of course, that is not entirely true, and that marketing is dangerous. Children thinking their messages are temporary are further encouraged to say and do things they shouldn't on the platform. When they become adults, those messages can haunt them.

Example Case: Caitlin Davis

Caitlin Davis was a New England Patriots cheerleader. Many young girls dream of being on the cheer squad for a professional sports team, and the NFL is the pinnacle. She was removed from the squad after a photo from a college Halloween party surfaced from several years before, when she was 18 years old. The photo featured drawings on a classmate who was asleep at a party, some of which featured symbols that would be generally recognized as hate speech. As distasteful as the images were, it is important to note that Caitlin was featured in the picture. There is no evidence that she drew the offensive symbols. Regardless, the team did not want to be associated with the photo, and Caitlin lost her job, and likely a childhood dream.

The lesson here is one of social media. When a person experiences success, these types of images have a habit of surfacing at the worst possible time. Many people throughout the years have been at college Halloween parties. Many have had pictures taken at those parties that feature questionable content. However, if you were to post those pictures on social media, they can come back to haunt you. Most companies report that they have rejected candidates for a job based on their social media profiles. It is now common practice to look through publicly available information about a candidate before hiring them. Your online preferences can prevent you from getting a job or get you fired. It is important to ensure you are not saying things online or posting content online that you would not want a potential employer to read or see. Chances are they will see and read all of it. (Maivha, 2018) (The Manifest, 2020)

The digital world is a model of resilience. It is very difficult to destroy a piece of information entirely. Information is copied between servers effortlessly and is thoroughly backed up to the point where even when the owners of the servers and services want to fully delete a piece of information, they struggle to do so.

It should be assumed that everything posted online will last forever and be public. It should also be assumed that negative sentiments are more likely to go viral than positive sentiments. Furthermore, you have no idea when you post something whether it will be seen by a small group of friends or millions of people. Therefore, before you post anything online, ensure it is something you would be comfortable saying in real life, in front of a crowd, on video. If you would be comfortable in that scenario, you should post it proudly. If you would not, you should not.

Many people get into trouble on social media thinking they are speaking to a small circle of friends. While those people may see your post first, the mission of social media is to drive engagement. If your post will grab attention, whether for the right or wrong reasons, you should expect your post to be amplified. When you go to get your next job or get into a prestigious university, you should expect the hiring manager or admissions personnel will see that post.

Next, we will talk about the truth behind the façade of social media.

The truth behind the façade

Social media reminds me of Las Vegas. The first time I went to Las Vegas, I, like most people visiting it for the first time, was taken aback by the amazing buildings. However, when I went inside the buildings, I realized that they are standard buildings with a fancy façade. There is little difference in the actual architecture of the buildings; they have simply been decorated differently. As you spend more time in Las Vegas, especially away from the strip, you start to see more of the city that does not fit the image the entertainment capital of the world likes to project.

Social media is the same way. It is not real life. People post what they want you to see. Ironically, influencers, who people follow because they trust their opinion, are paid to position products and very rarely give real opinions that they are not compensated for. The result is entire online communities designed to appear real that are no more real than any Hollywood set or advertising campaign. The difference is people believe it's real life.

What many people post on social media platforms portrays a fantasy life people want you to believe they live. Some people go so far as to pay for photoshoots complete with props to make them look more successful. If you see someone sitting on the hood of an Italian supercar wearing fancy jewelry and designer clothes, it would be easy to think they own the car, the clothes, and the jewelry, and that's what they want you to think. However, it is more likely that they paid a studio to help them project that image of success. When people post their amazing pictures from vacation, you may be jealous that you are not able to afford such a lavish vacation to such an exotic locale. However, they don't post the other 51 weeks of the year they are not on vacation, or their credit card statements, which may show they couldn't really afford to take that vacation, either. There is nothing wrong with the platforms themselves, but the content can portray an unrealistic image that can be damaging, especially to children. When people view these platforms and use them to judge whether they are successful in their own life by comparing themselves to others they see on the platform, it becomes dangerous. The most important thing to remember is most of it is not real.

Other social media platforms are designed to drive engagement. These platforms can be dangerous in my opinion. Their goal is to get you engaged with the platform so they can sell your attention to advertisers who may want to target you. Because the platform knows so much about you, advertisers can target potential customers in a more granular fashion than any previous type of advertising. Social media is a genius invention as a marketing platform. However, what most people don't understand is the users of the service are the product. The platform only exists to create more users of the service so there is more product to sell to advertisers. This is what makes the platform dangerous. Engagement is all that matters. Positive or negative consequences are not built into the algorithms. The result is not only a commentary on social media but also a commentary on society. We engage more with negative content. We are more interested in argument than agreement, and we like to form groups of like-minded people. Over the years, the algorithms have learned to maximize this behavior in a way that maximizes profits. So, who is to blame, us or them? In the end, it doesn't matter. People are being hurt and social media platforms know it. They are now faced with a similar dilemma as tobacco companies in the past. Evidence suggests they know their product causes harm, but their business model depends on the harm being caused. Can they be trusted to self-regulate?

When I talk about this topic, people ask me about my social media choices. I am a former social media user, and I deleted most of my social media presence years ago. It is like any other addiction, it was difficult at first, but it got easier over time. Now I do not miss it, and I am happier and healthier than I was when I was an active user of social media. I maintain a presence on LinkedIn for professional connections, but I take great care to always speak on LinkedIn as I would in a business meeting. Ultimately, the choice is up to each individual. I understand the need for children to belong to a community. It was easier as an established adult to turn away from social media. I do believe that most children, teenagers, and young adults will have some social media presence. However, I am hopeful that they will be aware of what the platform is and why it exists and understand how to use it in a way that maximizes the benefits while avoiding the issues it can create.

Next, we will explore the dangers online that go beyond side effects and turn toward people who intentionally seek to hurt people online.

The danger lurking online

The internet has done wonders for people across all walks of life. It has made it easier to learn and connect. It has given us access to people and information that we would have never had otherwise. As much as it has done those things for all of us, it has done that and more for criminals and corporations that prey on people.

The internet allows people to communicate with others while pretending to be someone or something that they are not in ways that would be very difficult in the physical world. This ranges from companies profiting from harming our children to bullies who use online platforms to spread their negativity to a wider group than was previously possible, to traditional predators who now have the ability to lurk in new places and meet our children in ways that were previously impossible.

The digital world has all the same threats to our children and our families as the physical world, but just like the internet has helped bring multinational corporations or geographically dispersed families closer together, it has also helped bring predators closer to their victims. I talk a lot about children in this chapter because they are growing up in a world where they are so comfortable with technology that they trust things online more than they should. However, when it comes to predators, the warnings are as applicable to our parents as they are to our children. I talk about this simple fact with many of the companies I work with, but it is applicable to all of us. Never before in human history has someone with negative intent had more access to victims, a higher likelihood of success, and a lower likelihood of facing consequences than they do right now. Simply put, it's never been easier to be a criminal. Therefore, it is important that we all understand the dangers and how we can protect ourselves.

First, we will talk about how social media monetizes misery and how we can help our loved ones resist the gravitational pull of negativity in those platforms. Also, I will try to provide some advice on how parents can recognize this before it ends in tragedy.

Social media and monetizing misery

Social media platforms are designed to keep us engaged. Negative emotions drive our behavior more than positive ones. As a result, social media platforms can lead to toxic environments where people are mean to each other, and participants' mental health is impacted in a negative way. Some have accused social media platforms of monetizing misery. That is both true in one sense and unfair in another. Social media platforms are run by algorithms, not monitored by people. The algorithms don't have emotions and are not built to recognize emotions in us. They are built to drive engagement. They learn how to drive engagement by running micro-experiments over time. The way we react to different stimuli builds the algorithm and teaches it how to keep us engaged. Our increased engagement with negative content means the algorithms are more likely to show us that negative content. Social media platforms are not necessarily monetizing misery; they are monetizing engagement. We are engaging with content that makes us miserable.

Example Case: Molly Russell

In 2017, 14-year-old Molly Russell died of suicide days before her birthday. She was heavily engaged with social media, and among her other interests, she was exposed to graphic images of self-harm and suicide-promoting content. Molly's father accuses the social media companies of helping to kill his daughter. Based on the messages she left before her suicide, it was clear Molly was dealing with a mixture of mental health issues and common challenges for a teenage girl. She did not feel like she fit in and she was struggling with her place in the world. Many teens have dealt with these feelings throughout human history. Until now, they did not have access to content that showed them how to harm themselves or that normalized the idea of self-harm and suicide. It is impossible to know for sure whether Molly would be alive today if it were not for social media; however, it is impossible to imagine that the content she was shown on the platform did not contribute to her tragic death.

Molly's father has been outspoken about the role he believes social media played in his daughter's death. As a result, Instagram pledged to remove content depicting self-harm or encouraging suicide. One month later, similar content was found on the platform. It is easy in this case to demonize Instagram, but there is a math problem at work. Instagram has 450 employees, most of which are not involved in content moderation. It has 1.3 billion users on the platform. Any one of those 1.3 billion people can post content. Do we really expect the 450 employees to review all posts from the 1.3 billion users and remove everything that could be offensive or harmful? It isn't possible. Social media is designed to democratize content and allow anyone to post anything they'd like. You cannot have an open platform like that and expect it to be moderated.

Meanwhile, the family is exploring their legal options. As part of the case, thousands of images and pieces of content Molly was exposed to were shared with the legal team, who had difficulty viewing the images because they were so disturbing. The challenge facing us with social media is that there are no easy answers. It is impossible to expect the platforms to be policed by the companies themselves. They don't have enough employees to do that. Perhaps we could develop algorithms that promote positive content, but would we still use the service, or would it break the business model? We should do everything we can to prevent young people like Molly Russell from seeing things with such tragic consequences, but what can we do? I don't have the answers, but it must start with meaningful dialogue about the problem. (BBC News, 2020) (Hurynag, 2020)

Parenting in the information age is difficult. Parenting is always difficult, but it is more difficult than it has ever been right now. However, it is likely easier now than it ever will be again. This is the technology flywheel. With each passing day, there are more potential dangers emerging and more ways for children, especially teenagers, to engage with the world away from the watchful eyes of their parents. It is more important than it has ever been for parents to engage with their children to understand how they are feeling and what they are thinking.

It is difficult to raise children, and teenagers are especially difficult. I do not advocate trying to spy on your children, although some of my friends do and there are some great technologies that will allow a parent to do so. However, I do advocate trying to understand your children's emotional state and monitor for changes. If you see signs that your child is less happy or more absorbed in the digital world than you would like, you should intervene.

That intervention can be in any way you see fit. For example, you could try to limit screen time or introduce your child to alternatives that get them out of the house and off their phones. A friend of mine was concerned about his daughter and took her on a trip to a beach. Each day, they went snorkeling. While this was great bonding time, more importantly, his daughter couldn't use her phone while she was in the water. While she returned to social media when the trip was over, the break was enough to get her back in a positive frame of mind.

The type of intervention is up to the parent. My recommendation is to act. There are too many heartbreaking stories where parents saw warning signs and didn't act quickly. Everything happens faster in the digital world, including downward spirals that lead to tragic outcomes. Humans are naturally more affected by negative stimuli than positive stimuli. We see this in loss aversion. Studies have shown that people are far more upset when they lose something than they are happy when they gain something of equal value. We see the same pattern on the news, which also thrives on engagement. People wonder why the news shows more negative stories than positive ones. The reason is simple. We engage more with the negative than the positive. Social media algorithms have learned this tendency as well. The most important thing to remember is there is no part of a social media algorithm that is altruistic. It does not take into account whether its users are happy or sad, just whether they are engaged. We cannot trust the algorithms to care for our children. They won't.

Next, we are going to discuss the challenges associated with giving bullies a platform.

Cyberbullies

Bullies are not a new phenomenon; however, when they are given a platform as large as that offered by social media, it can feel to the victim as if the entire world has turned against them. Bullies are often insecure, attention-starved people and they bully others, so they feel better about themselves by making others feel lower than they are. Social media gives bullies a platform to accomplish their aims on a larger scale.

Cyberbullying often has real-world consequences. Victims of bullying often suffer significant mental health problems that are amplified when the bullying happens online. Next, we will discuss the issues that can occur when predators seek out their victims online.

Cyber predators

It is much easier to hide your true identity online than it is in the physical world. While most of us understand this intuitively, we may not consciously think about the fact that it has aided predators who would like to target our children online. Predators may lurk anywhere they can find their intended victims, including chat rooms and popular children's games. They can then use the relationships they've built with children online to target them in real life.

While it may be tempting to monitor everything your children do online, it is unrealistic to do so after a certain age. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation advises parents to instead talk to their children about what is going on in their day-to-day life, including asking them about the friends they interact with online. While online communities have made it more difficult to control the sphere of people who may influence our children, it is still possible to use parenting best practices to try to keep our children safe.

Next, we will talk about scammers.

Scammers

Like other criminals, frauds, con artists, and scammers have moved online. There are several scams that target different groups of people. Many of them are laughable when you see them, but it is important to remember that scammers do not need a high success rate for their schemes to be lucrative. Often, the scams target the very old and the very young or the disabled. In short, scammers are targeting the most vulnerable people among us. Other scams are designed to prey on people who are desperate to believe the scam is real. Romance scams are a common type of scam that plays on a person's need to be loved. These scams involve someone pretending to be someone else. Sometimes called catfishing, romance scams often result in financial fraud.

Example Case: Nnamdi Marcellus MgBodile

In 2021, Nnamdi Marcellus MgBodile was convicted of multiple crimes, including various fraud charges, and sentenced to 13 years in prison for running romance scams that cost their victims over $5 million. MgBodile ran these romance scams, among other scams, with a group of other people. Essentially, a romance scam preys upon lonely people in an effort to siphon money from them or their families. In one of the scams involving a Virginia woman, the money was coming from a trust fund set up to take care of her children. MgBodile also ran other scams, including business email compromise scams designed to trick people into sending him money from their businesses.

Romance scams often follow familiar patterns to phishing schemes, but the romance element, especially for people who are desperate for companionship, obscures people's ability to think critically about what they're being asked to do. MgBodile was a prolific con man, but there are hundreds of examples of romance scams, and there is even a movie and a TV show dedicated to one specific type, known as catfishing.

While many people are able to find people to talk to or even romantic partners online, it is important to be able to separate what you know from what you think you know. If you are trying to meet someone in person or talk to them live on a phone call and they are resistant, that should be a red flag that they may not be who they claim they are. This does not mean you should meet everyone you communicate with online in person; that would be dangerous. It simply means that anyone you communicate with online should be treated with skepticism and suspicion. The old adage also remains true. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. We need to educate our children and potentially our parents or other loved ones about romance scams and what types of things can happen when they trust people online. As was shown in the MgBodile case, the results can be devastating for victims. (Hollis, 2021)

Other types of scams prey upon people's innate desire to help others or to achieve some benefit for themselves. Think about how little you can verify about a person. If you have never spoken to them or met them, you know only what they tell you, and there is no guarantee that any of that information is real. Scammers love online communication because of the anonymity they are granted by default.

Next, we will shift gears to talk about how a person can practically avoid reusing passwords. Among the best tools available for this purpose are password managers.

Password managers

Most people do not understand the lessons you have learned in this book about reusing passwords and why it is so critical to have complex passwords. It is important for them to learn the importance of not reusing passwords and what can happen if they do. It is also important to familiarize them with the tools, such as password managers, that can help them. When I talk about complex passwords and using unique passwords for every site they visit, the reaction is always the same. How will I remember all of those complex passwords? Of course, the answer is you don't need to remember them; a password manager will remember them for you.

It is important to highlight the need to use a password manager that you trust. You are inputting all your passwords into a vault. If the vault itself is not secure, your passwords are also not safe. Choosing a password manager should be an intentional process with due diligence. You should look into the company that provides the password manager. There are some large, reputable companies that provide password manager technology. Many of them offer both free and paid versions.

This advice is valuable for evaluating all services, not just password managers. People don't create software without trying to generate some economic benefit. If you do not understand their model for how they monetize their software, that should give you pause. There is no such thing as a free service. Free social media services are gathering information about you that they can sell to advertisers. It's OK to use social media as long as you understand what you are trading for what you are receiving. Whenever you sign up for a free service, ask what you are trading. If you cannot answer that question, you should be wary of the service. Most legitimate password managers offer a free version, but the features are limited and there is a more feature-rich paid version. Even if you only use the free version, you know how the company makes its money.

Next, we will talk about multifactor authentication.

Multifactor authentication

Consumer multifactor authentication involves verifying your identity using a text message to your phone or a verification sent to a mobile application. While multifactor authentication can be a hassle at times, it will prevent most attacks against your account. The result is any application or service that will allow you to purchase something or log into other applications should be protected by multifactor authentication. While that seems like a small subset of services, most services in common use will do one or both of those things.

Most actors looking to compromise a consumer account will not go through the hassle of trying to defeat multifactor authentication. This is especially true when there are so many targets who do not have it enabled. In some cases, such as most consumer banking applications and websites, multifactor authentication is required. In other cases, it is optional. In most cases, it should be enabled when it is an option.

Next, we will discuss password complexity and the reason it is important.

Password complexity and why it matters

Password length and complexity are particularly effective against brute-force attacks and rainbow tables. A brute-force attack is where a system is used to try combinations of passwords until one works. This is where password length is supremely important. Each additional character increases the work factor of a brute-force attack exponentially. Using a baseline of 15 million key attempts per second, a brute-force system could crack a seven-character password in less than 10 minutes. A 13-character password using the same system would take well over 300,000 years. As computing power continues to improve, those time frames continue to come down, but longer passwords are exponentially better than shorter ones. Adding three characters to every password the next time you change it will significantly reduce the risk of a successful brute-force attack.

A rainbow table attack is an attack against commonly used passwords. Passwords are not stored as plain text; they are stored as hashes. A rainbow table is a database of common passwords that are converted to a hash. The attacker can then look for collisions and gain access to the system. Using password complexity to ensure your passwords are not common words will reduce your exposure to rainbow table attacks as well.

Of course, many passwords are compromised and if they are reused, no combination of length and complexity will protect you. However, length and password complexity can make it unlikely that you will fall victim to these types of techniques that do not rely upon compromise or social engineering.

Next, we will talk about one of my favorite topics. Many people who are concerned with their personal information being exposed in a breach are giving similar information away for free by answering surveys or posting on social media. The easiest way to protect your personal information is to stop voluntarily publishing it online.

Stop publishing your information!

Most people do not understand how valuable information about them can be. One of the practices that makes me cringe most is posts that say something to the effect of Your rock star name is your favorite color and the street you grew up on. When you post your rock star name, you have given away valuable information about yourself that may be used to steal your online identity. There are countless examples of surveys, quizzes, and similar posts that may be innocuous but could just as easily be used to harvest information about people on social media.

The reality is if you live in a developed nation there are many databases that contain information about you. Some are maintained by nation states such as China or Russia, and some are maintained by bad actors who will sell their aggregated data to the highest bidder on the dark web for a variety of purposes. While it is impossible to ensure you don't exist in these databases, you can take steps to make it more difficult for bad actors to create a comprehensive digital profile about you.

You may be thinking it is infeasible for an attacker to be reading social media posts and meticulously gathering information about everyone they encounter. That is correct, and that is not how it is done. Information is gathered in an automated fashion using a technique called scraping.

Scraping

Scraping is a method of using automated tools to gather and organize large volumes of publicly available information. Many times, aggregated data that results from scraping is mistakenly referred to as a data breach. It is not a data breach because all the information was publicly available. However, while the individual pieces of data often have little value, the aggregation of large volumes of data can be useful to bad actors. Scraping is common. There are technologies that help providers prevent others from using scraping tools on their websites, but there is little way for a consumer to know whether their favorite services use those tools and if so, whether they are effective. It should be assumed that anything you post online is visible to anyone and that they will have the ability to copy it to a data repository.

Example Case: LinkedIn "Breach"

In June 2021, reports of a large-scale data breach of over 700 million LinkedIn members were published. This was reported as a data leak of information belonging to over 90% of the LinkedIn membership. The data breach was made known when it was discovered that the information was available for sale on the dark web. However, none of the data was stolen; it was simply publicly available information that was scraped. The reality is this was not a data breach at all, but a highlight of the fact that anything that is posted online is public and anyone can scrape it and aggregate it for whatever purpose they choose. If someone wants access to a database of this information and is willing to pay for it, there is little to stop them from aggregating the data and putting it up for sale.

Once it was made known that no private information was stolen and the information was simply an aggregation of what was publicly available, most LinkedIn members reacted with a shrug. However, some people on social media are posting things online that they shouldn't, and these types of scraping could be damaging to them. It is important to pay attention to what you post online and assume it will live forever. (Morris, 2021) (LinkedIn, 2021)

I am certain that social media has done good in the world. Helping people connect with others or stay connected with distant family members or friends likely has a societal benefit. However, there are major dangers of social media, especially for young people.

Summary

The digital world is a dangerous place, but there are steps you can take to keep yourself and your loved ones safe online. In this chapter, you have learned about the permanence of what you post online, the façade of social media, and the dangers lurking online in the form of bullies, predators, and companies who will seek to profit off misery. You have learned about password managers, multifactor authentication, and password complexity, which are tools to help you keep your accounts safe and prevent you from falling into common security traps. Finally, you learned about the importance of keeping your personal information safe by not publishing it online.

This is the end of our journey. By this point, you are ready to make a difference in the field of cybersecurity. You understand more about the problem and ways to formulate solutions. It is my hope that reading this book has interested you in this field and that you will build on these ideas to make every organization and person you encounter in your career a little smarter, a little more cyber aware, and a little safer.

Check your understanding

  1. What is a password manager? What problems does it help people solve?
  2. What is multifactor authentication?
  3. Explain why password length is important.
  4. Explain why password complexity is important.
  5. What is scraping?

Further reading

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