Cybersecurity Basics for Everyone is a plain-English cybersecurity primer for the reader who is not a security professional — the small-business owner, the parent, the office worker, the retiree — who wants to understand how the most common attacks actually work and what to do about them. Follow the fictional Sentinel Ridge Security team through ten chapters covering the new threat landscape (from lone hackers to industrial crime, the money trail, AI as a force multiplier), speaking the language of security (the CIA triad, authentication vs authorization, risk = likelihood × impact), how phishing actually works (the kill chain, the three-second test, email/text/voice/deepfake variants, what to do if you already clicked), passwords, MFA, and strong enough (password managers, MFA from weakest to strongest, what a passkey actually is, the personal account priority list), malware and ransomware explained (the malware family tree, a ransomware attack day-by-day, why backups change everything, blast radius and recovery path), everyday defenses that work (five-habit cheat sheet, the two-minute browser cleanup, the weekly ten-minute check), safer at work (business email compromise, shadow IT, the ten-item small business baseline), safer at home (home network hardening, kids and family devices, the neighborhood analogy), when things go wrong (incident response for real people, when to call for help), and the credible next decade (AI-augmented attacks, passkeys, zero trust for regular humans). Written for anyone who wants to understand cybersecurity without the doom and without the jargon.
