Hacked again, it can happen to anyone even a cyber security expert by Scott Schober. Book review

By @SimonCocking. Review of Scott Schober‘ s CEO, Cybersecurity & Wireless Tech Expert & contributor on Fox, Bloomberg, GMA, CNN, CCTV, CNBC author of @HackedAgainBook available to buy here.

In some ways this book should perhaps have been called ‘Hacked again, it can happen to anyone especially a cyber security expert’. The challenge for Scott Schober being that the more he points out cyber security flaws, the more he annoys hackers and people that are likely to be annoyed and have the skills to do something about this.

It is a useful book to read, to remind yourself of at least the very basic security password protocols you should put in place to protect yourself online. As Scober describes on several occasions his company is affected by other weak links in the chain, especially including the bank he used. Their response to his notification that he had been hacked, with money removed from his account, were dismayingly lax and ineffectual. Several times the response was along the lines of ‘these losses are something that happen to us all the time and we have provisioned for it accordingly’. Surely not the most reassuring response from the people who you trust to lodge your money with.

Schober does have some good advice, as you expect, around what to do to minimise your chances of being affected. One key concept that runs through the book is that hackers are always looking for the lowest line of resistance. If you chose to select a password such as ‘password’, ‘123456’ etc, or actually any simplistic combination of regular words, you are making life much easier for hackers. If you haven’t heard of John the Ripper (a password cracking program) you can rest unassured that any pass word without non alphanumeric characters (ie not letters or numbers) is asking for trouble.

It is a challenge to keep passwords that are complex enough to slow down hackers. It’s close to impossible to stop a password getting hacked, but the harder and longer you make it, the more it becomes a less appealing prospect compared to ‘123456’ etc. Scott then talks about the value of not keeping passwords online. Something we should all probably do, but then we just need to remember where we wrote them down, and ideally NOT on the screen of the computer!

It’s a good book to read, well presented, with bit sized chapters to get the key concepts across. Read it if you can, and if you value what you have on line!

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