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Review: Cyber Smart

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Cyber Smart

Do you believe you’re not interesting or important enough to be targeted by a cybercriminal? Do you think your personal data doesn’t hold any value? Bart R. McDonough proves why those beliefs are wrong in his book Cyber Smart: Five Habits to Protect Your Family, Money, and Identity from Cyber Criminals.

McDonough, CEO and Founder of Agio, is a cybersecurity expert, speaker and author with more than 20 years of experience in the field, and this is his debut book.

Cyber Smart: Five Habits to Protect Your Family, Money, and Identity from Cyber Criminals

He starts by debunking the most common cybersecurity myths, like the one mentioned above. Whether you like it or not, you are important, and your data is important. Also, everything has a price.

McDonough explains all the possible risks and threats you could encounter in a connected world, who are the bad actors, what their goals are and, most importantly, their attack methods.

The author presents five golden rules – or, as he calls them, “Brilliance in the Basics” habits – you should be complying with to maintain a good cybersecurity hygiene: update your devices, enable two-factor authentication, use a password manager, install and update antivirus software, and back up your data.

The second half of the book gives you detailed and specific recommendations on how to protect your:

  • Identity
  • Children
  • Money
  • Email
  • Files
  • Social media
  • Website access and passwords
  • Computer
  • Mobile devices
  • Home Wi-Fi
  • IoT devices
  • Your information when traveling.

McDonough doesn’t use scare tactics that could possibly make you want to forego all technology and go live in the woods. On the contrary, he wants you to embrace it and understand that even if the online world poses so many threats, there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself.

Who is this book for?

You don’t need to be a cybersecurity professional to understand this book. Its language is simple and it offers many comprehensible everyday examples and detailed tips. It’s a book you should definitely have in your home library, also for future reference.

The author has a very clear message: don’t just sit back and hope bad actors will pass you over. Be proactive and take all the possible and necessary steps to secure your data and your devices.

Three Areas to Consider, to Focus Your Cyber-Plan

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The administrator of your personal data will be Threatpost, Inc., 500 Unicorn Park, Woburn, MA 01801. Detailed information on the processing of personal data can be found in the privacy policy. In addition, you will find them in the message confirming the subscription to the newsletter.

Exploiting GDPR to Get Private Information

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A researcher abused the GDPR to get information on his fiancee:

It is one of the first tests of its kind to exploit the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018. The law shortened the time organisations had to respond to data requests, added new types of information they have to provide, and increased the potential penalty for non-compliance.

“Generally if it was an extremely large company — especially tech ones — they tended to do really well,” he told the BBC.

“Small companies tended to ignore me.

“But the kind of mid-sized businesses that knew about GDPR, but maybe didn’t have much of a specialised process [to handle requests], failed.”

He declined to identify the organisations that had mishandled the requests, but said they had included:

  • a UK hotel chain that shared a complete record of his partner’s overnight stays

  • two UK rail companies that provided records of all the journeys she had taken with them over several years

  • a US-based educational company that handed over her high school grades, mother’s maiden name and the results of a criminal background check survey.

Why Isn't GDPR Being Enforced?

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Politico has a long article making the case that the lead GDPR regulator, Ireland, has too cozy a relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies to effectively regulate their privacy practices.

Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee, having wooed top Silicon Valley firms to the Emerald Isle with promises of low taxes, open access to top officials, and help securing funds to build glittering new headquarters.

Now, data-privacy experts and regulators in other countries alike are questioning Ireland’s commitment to policing imminent privacy concerns like Facebook’s reintroduction of facial recognition software and data sharing with its recently purchased subsidiary WhatsApp, and Google’s sharing of information across its burgeoning number of platforms.