Beyond the Book
In addition to what you’re reading right now, this product also comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that covers important cybersecurity actions. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for Cybersecurity For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box.
Where to Go from Here
Cybersecurity For Dummies is designed in such a fashion that you don’t have to read the book in order or even read the entire book.
If you purchased this book because you suffered a cybersecurity breach of some sort, for example, you can skip to the chapters in Part 5 without reading the prior material (although reading it afterwards may be wise, as it may help you prevent yourself from becoming the victim of another cyberattack).
Part 1
Getting Started with Cybersecurity
IN THIS PART …
Discover what cybersecurity is and why defining it is more difficult than you might expect.
Find out why breaches seem to occur so often and why technology alone does not seem to stop them.
Learn how societal changes can dramatically impact cybersecurity.
Explore various types of common cyberthreats and common cybersecurity tools.
Understand the who, how, and why of various types of attackers and threatening parties that aren’t officially malicious.
Chapter 1
What Exactly Is Cybersecurity?
IN THIS CHAPTER
To improve your ability to keep yourself and your loved ones cybersecure, you need to understand what cybersecure means, what your goals should be vis-à-vis cybersecurity, and what exactly you’re securing against.
While the answers to these questions may initially seem simple and straightforward, they aren’t. As you see in this chapter, these answers can vary dramatically between people, company divisions, organizations, and even within the same entity at different times.
Cybersecurity Means Different Things to Different Folks
While cybersecurity may sound like a simple enough term to define, in actuality, from a practical standpoint, it means quite different things to different people in different situations, leading to extremely varied relevant policies, procedures, and practices. Individuals who want to protect their social media accounts from hacker takeovers, for example, are exceedingly unlikely to assume many of the approaches and technologies used by Pentagon workers to secure classified networks.
Typically, for example:
For individuals, cybersecurity means that their personal data is not accessible to anyone other than themselves and others they have authorized, and that their computing devices work properly and are free from malware.
For small business owners, cybersecurity may include ensuring that credit card data is properly protected and that standards for data security are properly implemented at point-of-sale registers.
For firms conducting online business, cybersecurity may include protecting servers that untrusted outsiders regularly interact with.
For shared service providers, cybersecurity may entail protecting numerous data centers that house numerous servers that, in turn, host many virtual servers belonging to many different organizations.
For the government, cybersecurity may include establishing different classifications of data, each with its own set of related laws, policies, procedures, and technologies.
Technically speaking, cybersecurity is the subset of information security that addresses information and information systems that store and process data in electronic form, whereas information security encompasses the security of all forms of data (for example, securing a paper file and a filing cabinet).
That said, today, many people colloquially interchange the terms, often referring to aspects of information security that are technically not part of cybersecurity as being part of the latter. Such usage also results from the blending of the two in many situations. Technically speaking, for example, if someone writes down a password on a piece of paper and leaves the paper on a desk where other people can see the password instead of placing the paper in a safe deposit box or safe, that person has violated a principle of information security, not of cybersecurity, even though those actions may result in serious cybersecurity repercussions.
Cybersecurity Is a Constantly Moving Target
While the ultimate goal of cybersecurity may not change much over time, the policies, procedures, and technologies used to achieve it change dramatically as the years march on. Many approaches and technologies that were more than adequate to protect consumers’ digital data in 1980, for example, are effectively worthless today, either because they’re no longer practical to employ or because technological advances have rendered them obsolete or impotent.
While assembling a complete list of every advancement that the world has seen in recent decades and how such changes impact cybersecurity in effectively impossible, we can examine several key development area and their impacts on the ever-evolving nature of cybersecurity: technological changes, economic model shifts, and outsourcing.
Technological changes
Technological changes tremendously impact cybersecurity. New risks come along with the new capabilities and conveniences that new offerings deliver. As the pact of technological advancement continues to increase, therefore, so does the pace of new cybersecurity risks. While the number of such risks created over the past few decades as the result of new offerings is astounding, the areas described in the following sections have yielded a disproportionate impact on cybersecurity.
Digital data
In the last few decades we have witnessed dramatic changes in the technologies that exist, as well as who use such technologies, how they do so, and for what purposes. All of these factors impact cybersecurity.
Consider, for example, that when many of the people alive today were children, controlling access to data