Cyber Curiosity

A Beginner's Guide to Cybersecurity - How to Protect Yourself in the Modern World

Lakeidra Smith

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781637303139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Every year, thousands of people fall victim to phone scams, phishing attacks, and identity theft. But the consequences of these attacks are completely preventable if you practice cybersecurity awareness.

Many associate cybersecurity with large corporations, so why is it important for you? Cyber Curiosity: A Beginner's Guide to Cybersecurity-How to Protect Yourself in the Modern World answers this through the stories of individuals and corporations alike. You will learn why you should keep separate passwords and how cybercrimes are committed. You will read about:

• The couple who set up a smart security camera system only to find that it was recording them for the world to see
• How a ransomware attack brought the DCH hospital system of West Alabama to its knees
• What it's like being a victim of a romance scam resulting in over two million dollars in damages

Cyber Curiosity breaks down these stories and pulls in the experts to help equip you with the tools needed to bolster your own cybersecurity awareness. It's not all about the big tech data breaches on the news-cybersecurity is about making the right decisions to protect yourself, your loved ones, and your information.

Part 1

What is Cybersecurity

Chapter 1
Redefining Cybersecurity

“The five most efficient cyber defenders are: Anticipation, Education, Detection, Reaction, and Resilience. Do remember: Cybersecurity is much more than an IT topic.”

—Stephane Nappo24

Cybersecurity isn’t simply a buzzword that has gotten a lot of press lately. It also represents a multibillion-dollar issue with the FBI reporting $10.2 billion in total victim losses over the last five years.2526

Alongside problems come profits. According to Forbes, the global cybersecurity market was worth $173 billion in 2020, and it is expected to grow to $270 billion by 2026.27

Like Stephane Nappo, 2018 Global Chief Information Security Officer of the Year,28 I recognize that cybersecurity is so much more than a growing multibillion-dollar subsection of the IT industry. It can be argued how much of the discipline of cybersecurity is even directly IT-related, and as you will see as we define cybersecurity in modern terms, this field has a human element at its core.

Therefore, I believe the best cybersecurity solution is one that emphasizes the human element. We, the users of the devices, hold a lot of power over our security—far more power than we realize or care to admit.

Unlike other IT industries like software development, which mainly rely on the proper input from the human and the proper output from the machine, cybersecurity was defined and is constantly evolving because humans are curious. It’s just our nature.

Some of us use that curiosity for good, and others, not so much.

We like to tinker with things, to test their limitations. Some of us are motivated by fame, others by fortune, some by pure delight at finding out how something works.

Because of this, with the invention of the Internet and therefore a worldwide interconnected network of computers, we brought about new avenues for humans to explore their curiosity, sometimes at the expense of other humans.

Defining Cybersecurity

Before we look at the modern definition of cybersecurity, let’s take a trip back in time to recount the closest thing the cybersecurity community has to an origin story.

It was November 2, 1988. Robert Morris, a Cornell University computer science graduate student, hacked into an MIT computer and changed the way we view the Internet.29

For months, Morris had been developing a program he believed would spread slowly and secretly across the Internet. He’d written an experimental worm, a self-replicating program, just to see if it was possible. His plan was to release the worm from MIT to disguise his identity as a Cornell student.30

At around 8:30 p.m., Morris unleashed the worm, and soon after, he discovered the program was spreading far faster than he anticipated. There was a bug in his program. The computer worm was spreading at an extremely high speed and bringing computer speeds to a crawl in its path.31

“We are currently under attack,” wrote a concerned University of California, Berkeley student in an email later that night. In the span of twenty-four hours, it’s estimated that 6,000 of the 60,000 computers connected to the Internet at the time had been attacked.32

Even though the worm didn’t destroy or damage data, it managed to greatly harm productivity. Essential military and university systems were halted, and emails were delayed for days.33

Technologists worked tirelessly to figure out how the worm functioned and how it could be removed. Given the nature of the attack, exact damages were difficult to estimate, but they range anywhere from $100,000 to millions.34

Immediately following the attack, Morris contacted two of his friends in a panic. He admitted he was responsible for launching the worm, but he never intended it to get this out of control.35

He requested one of his friends to deliver an anonymous message from him across the Internet. He wanted to issue an apology and a guide on how to remove the worm. Unfortunately, because of the damage that the worm had done to the network, few people received the message in time.36

Unbeknownst to Morris, his other friend made an anonymous call to The New York Times. The friend blabbed to the reporter that he knew the person responsible for creating the program, but it was only meant to be a harmless experiment. The creator had no idea the extent of the damage that would be caused and that its spread was due to an error. It was the information gained from this call that would make the attack front-page news.37

The friend had many follow-up conversations with the reporter. During one of the conversations, the friend accidentally referred to the creator of the worm by his initials, RTM. The Times used that in...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1 What is Cybersecurity
• Chapter 1 Redefining Cybersecurity
• Chapter 2 Cybersecurity in Business
• Chapter 3 The Birth of Cyberspace
• Chapter 4 The Cyber Curiosity Mindset
• Part 2 What to Know About Cybersecurity
• Chapter 5 A New Threat Landscape
• Chapter 6 What is PII?
• Chapter 7 Malicious Intent
• Chapter 8 So Social
• Chapter 9 The Privacy Paradox
• Chapter 10 The New Oil
• Part 3 What to Do to Protect Yourself
• Chapter 11 The 3 Cs of Cyber Curiosity
• Chapter 12 Protecting Your PII
• Chapter 13 Protecting Vulnerable Populations
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix