Background: Why now?

A delusion that Internet is a safe place is gone. It is not, and it almost never has been one. It is not a coincidence but a consequence of many choices. Yes, choices - conscious decisions of involved parties.

Funding always goes in pair with innovation, new ideas, new features. Accomplishing results first, makes you visible, important, brings money to the table. Doing things securely – not necessarily. The most notable example here is probably the race among IT giants to dominate the browser market, which created a huge black hole sucking billions of dollars due to the numerous vulnerabilities discovered over the years.

Since the very beginning of a massive adoption in the early 90s, an average person had no idea about the issues connected to the introduced technology. It was a time of chaotic movements, a rise of viruses, malware, trojans, hackers, script kiddies, etc. In a response, the software industry came up with one answer to problems of users "trust us and let's go forward together". It was nothing else than ignorance of risks in favor of progress and making a big impact. Society got nothing, except the new area called Web Security.

The story seems to repeat itself now. We are the observers of the new era. Is cryptocurrency a first reflection of a browser from 90s? Is the adoption of blockchain technology a game changer like the Internet was? It seems quite possible. The results are also quite similar: a number of scamcoins, hacked exchanges, confusion of governments, etc. The desire to overtake the market by storm becomes more and more visible. It does not matter much that, e.g. Dao project completely backfired. Of course, it could be prevented, but the history is full of such mistakes caused by impatience. Progress will not stop and money will be a strong motivator to continue as it has always been.

Meanwhile, over 20 years later, the answer of the industry to an average user is still the same: "trust us and let's go forward together". Technology changes and improves pushing people to understand new trends like cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, etc. At the same time society has almost no idea about the fundamentals of cybersecurity . An ordinary person is left confused among new fancy terms and tools, unaware of potential problems, and still slowly coping with the debt of previous decades. It has to change.

Cybersecurity demystified: About the series

A status quo can, and should, be changed first and foremost by education. Steemit is a great place to make this change happen. It is an easily available source of knowledge, sponsored only by people who agree with presented ideas or topics. Without hidden promotions of products or support from corporations.

The goal of this series is to make important topics simple and understandable. Not only to IT professionals, but to a typical Steemit user. If you know e.g. how to check the browser history, you probably know enough. Do you want to know things like:

• How to limit the exposure?
• How can you defend against common hacks and tricks?
• How the discussed attack techniques work?

Be prepared. We are going for it.

Final words

• All the materials presented in this series are for educational purposes only. Not to harm others. By reading any post you silently agree to follow this rule.
• Would you like to join the project? Become a co- or featured author? You are welcome. Join on the Steemit chat: cybersecuritydemystified.
• You are kindly ask to make it visible, share it with others if you care about this initiative.
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• Add your comments and suggestions here or use the chat channel.
• A big thank you to people from Steemit chat for their comments and help ( @cristi, @noisy and others).

A note about the author:
@radoslaw is a software architect from Poland. Highly interested in complex, distributed systems and information security. Author's introduction.