Conscripted: Equipping Every Employee for Cyberwarfare

The intensity of data breaches and ransomware attacks has been unprecedented. Barely midway into the year 2021 we had recorded over 1000 ransomware attacks, far exceeding what has ever been seen in previous years. Millions of dollars have been paid in ransom and there have been thousands of reported data breaches affecting organizations of various sizes. Depending on whose report you’re reading, 80% to 95% of these breaches are caused by human error in the workplace—someone downloaded something she shouldn’t have, someone else forgot to download something he should have. This proliferation of fatal errors has driven organizations to increase their spending on employee cybersecurity awareness trainings, in hopes that this will save the situation and exempt them from the fast-growing list of cyberattack victims. However, this increase in awareness trainings does not seem to have changed much in the grand scheme of things. The curve of employee awareness trainings and corporate data breaches resulting from human error, when plotted on a simple time graph, both progress upward and to the right simultaneously. Recently it has been discovered that, while awareness trainings produce immediate results, there are certain limitations in them that make those results short-lived and the approach unsustainable. This book was born from a careful evaluation of those limitations in a bid to remedy the situation and provide enduring results. It is a self-led boot camp that does not merely educate employees and employers with cybersecurity best practices for the workplace, but goes much further to practically equip them with strategic tactics for effective combat in cyberwarefare within and outside the organization. If cyberspace is at war, and indeed it is, then this book in your hands is a conscription plan.