Cybersecurity & Encryption 101: Free PDF Course

This course teaches practical cybersecurity skills and knowledge, covering topics like personal online safety and understanding common cyber threats and attacker motivations. It aims to empower learners with expert-level security techniques to protect their digital lives and data in an increasingly connected world.

Course Benefits:

• Learn simple, effective ways to keep yourself safe in a connected world.
• Separate the truth from the marketing hype when shopping for VPNs and antivirus.
• Avoid the common mistakes that lead to 80% of cyberattacks.

What You’ll Learn:

• Secret techniques of security experts and white hat hackers.
• Who wants access to your private data, and the tricks they use to get it.
• How cryptography has evolved from ancient times to protect the modern internet.
• The unseen ways encryption impacts your life.

More About the Course

The key to countering cybercriminals is first to be aware of the methods they use and then to intentionally close off those avenues. This involves a combination of technology and common sense.

The vast majority of hacks occur because of weak, easily guessed passwords. Just like a real-world criminal would rather use a stolen key than break a window, there’s no reason for hackers to bother with complicated exploits when they can log in to your sensitive accounts in a seemingly legitimate way.

Some of the most common factors that make passwords guessable include:

• Using any of the 100 or so most common passwords
• Failing to change a device’s default password
• Basing passwords on publicly available information like your name or birthday
• Using a short password (five characters or less) that can be guessed in random attempts
• Using the same password on every site

The last bullet point is extremely important and is the reason why data breaches are so dangerous. If you use the same password for every account, your entire identity is only as strong as the weakest site you’ve used it on. Venmo may have reliable security, but if you log in with a password that was compromised in a breach elsewhere, your money is still forfeit.

You can foil 80% of cyber threats simply by using passwords that hackers can’t guess. Don’t worry, though — that doesn’t mean you have to spend your whole day sorting out 100 different strings of random letters and numbers.