Hack-Proof Your Life Now! The New Cybersecurity Rules


Posted on by Ben Rothke

Far Side creator Gary Larson wrote that a high-school biology teacher once told him she showed her class a number of Far Side comics at the beginning of the school year and most of the students didn't get the humor. She said a goal of the class was that by the end of the year, they should have learned enough science to see the humor in the comics.

Similarly, by the time a novice reader finishes Hack-Proof Your Life Now! The New Cybersecurity Rules: Protect your email, computers, and bank accounts from hacks, malware, and identity theft (Horsesmouth Publishing ISBN-13: 978-0997729009), they'll know enough to appreciate what they have to do to secure their accounts and systems.

Similar to How Not To Be Hacked: The Definitive Guide for Regular People by James DeLuccia, this is a very helpful book for the computer user who knows that computer security is crucial thing to do, but may feel too overwhelmed by the myriad highly and often overly technical books to do something about it.

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In the introduction, authors Sean Bailey and Devin Kropp give the reader an opportunity to discover their cybersecurity score. For those that don't do well, by following the action steps the book suggests; they can ensure that their score is in the secure range by the time they complete the book. The authors do a really good job of showing the reader what they can do to ensure that the computing practices they use and systems they work off of are as secure as possible.

The 3 parts of the book focus on these 3 areas: online, finance and awareness. Many of the suggestions are not so surprising easy and effective. For example, they suggest using a secret email account for financial accounts rather than your primary email address. Rather than using the same email address for everything, which over the years can spread to hundreds of sites; the use of a secret email account for financial accounts can limit the ability to have these accounts breached.

In the section on backing up data, the authors suggest that one should never pay ransomware. That may be good advice for someone who has already backed up their data and has it stored in a location where it won't be re-infected. But for the person who neglected to perform a backup, paying the ransom may be their only option to get their data back.

The truth be told, even if you followed all the advice in the book, you still could not hack proof your life. The truth is that the best you can do it to try to be hack resistant. And for those that want to do that, Hack-Proof Your Life Now is an excellent book to get them there.

 

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Contributors
Ben Rothke

Senior Information Security Manager, Tapad

anti-malware security awareness professional development & workforce

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