While many books have been written over the past couple decades on a wide variety of cybersecurity-related topics, most of them don’t provide the general population with the information needed to properly protect themselves.
Many cybersecurity books are directed toward highly technical audiences and tend to overwhelm people who are not computer scientists with extraneous information, creating severe challenges for readers seeking to translate the knowledge that they acquire from books into practical actions. On the flip side, various self-published introduction-to-cybersecurity books suffer from all sorts of serious deficiencies, including, in some cases, having been written by non-experts and presenting significant amounts of misinformation. Anyone interested in cybersecurity often shouldn’t trust these materials. Likewise, many security tip sheets and the like simply relay oft-repeated clichés and outdated advice, sometimes causing people who follow the recommendations contained within such works to worsen their cybersecurity postures rather than improve them. Furthermore, the nearly constant repetition of various cybersecurity advice by media personalities after news stories about breaches (“Don’t forget to reset all your passwords!”), coupled with the lack of consequences to most people after they do not comply with such directives, has led to cybersecurity fatigue — a condition in which folks simply don’t act when they actually need to because they have heard the “boy cry wolf” one too many times.
I wrote Cybersecurity For Dummies to provide people who do not work as cybersecurity professionals with a foundational book that can teach them what they need to know about cybersecurity and explain why they need to know it. This book offers you practical, clear, and straightforward advice that you can easily translate into actions that can help keep you and your children, parents, and small businesses cybersecure. The second edition of this book contains updates to help people understand and address cybersecurity risks created by changes to our world in terms of technological advances, societal changes, and new geopolitical realities.
