Book Review: Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business

Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business: Solve the Security Puzzle for Your Small Business and Home

Scott N. Schober, with Craig Schober (2019)

Digital Tattoo Rating: 4/5

Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business: Solve the Security Puzzle for Your Small Business and Home is a great guide on how to prevent and react to being hacked. The author, Scott Schober is the CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems – a wireless security tech firm, and has been a victim of hacking himself. Through hacking cases you might have seen in the news, personal anecdotes, and observations from years in the field, Schober makes the oft-scary world of cybersecurity approachable and unintimidating. Schober writes in an easy-to-read style while maintaining emphasis on the stakes of cybersecurity. It’s a tough balance to maintain, but one he pulls off quite well.

The real reason to read this book is that unlike many other books of the same genre, Schober’s guide covers both the personal and the business sides of the issue. Books about personal security are everywhere, and books about how to enhance business cybersecurity are on the shelves of every executive in the world. This 300-page (excluding index, etc.) text, while not a quick read, covers both of these realms while illustrating how the stakes of cybersecurity scale in these different settings. Another nice feature is the pop quizzes throughout the book, which test readers’ understandings of major themes.

Schober provides structure early on in the book with his introduction of the Five Stages of Being Hacked, which you see play out, in different phases and at different times, as Schober discusses cases of hacking throughout the book. They’re a good framework to bear in mind day-to-day too, as they can help you react efficiently to hacking and other cybersecurity threats.

These five stages are:

1. Ignorance. You have never been hacked. You never think about being hacked. Hacking only happens on TV shows. You’re just living your life. This is the “ignorance is bliss” stage, and it’s dangerous. You don’t want to be here.
2. Shock. Wait, what? Who has every file you’ve ever written? Your bank account was accessed from where? What!? This stage hurts, but it’s best to get over it quickly. In order to minimize damage, you’re going to need to cycle through the next few stages pretty quickly.
3. Reenactment. Here, you’re reverse-engineering the crime. Who could have seen your information, when, and where. When did you last log on to Facebook, which device did you give permission to save your Twitter password? You’re figuring out how this happened. Useful information, but again, not worth dwelling on once you’ve extracted the most relevant pieces.
4. Acknowledgement. Alright, you were hacked. It’s sunk in. You have an idea of how it happened. Oftentimes it was corrected easily, perhaps by changing a password. It has become an anecdote and nothing more. At this stage the most immediate threat is gone, and so most people end their reaction here. This isn’t a good move.
5. Rectification. This is the final step after plugging your most immediate leak, and one which you can also take well before you are ever hacked. This is the part where you go through your online habits and change them for the better, from beefing up your password game to learning what the heck a VPN is. This is also where Schober’s book can help you out, with his tips and tricks to get you thinking about cybersecurity in a proactive way.

Overall, this is a great book. It touches on issues faced by many groups and demographics, and is approachable in its delivery. It’s also comforting to know that when it comes to cybersecurity risks, even tech execs like Schober have the odd blip. In Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business, we have the opportunity to learn from those experiences.

Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business: Solve the Security Puzzle for Your Small Business and Home is available for e-readers here.

Written by: Samantha Summers

Edited by: Eseohe Ojo

Slider image: “Cybersecurity,” by jaydeep_.