Originally published on SDI Cyber, June 6th, 2017
It’s January 2nd and you have just finished your latest culinary blowout from the holiday season. You look down towards your toes and you see something obstructing your view that wasn’t there just three weeks ago. And of course, you fear walking towards the scale because you already know it’s going to be bad news.
So what do you do?
Sign up for an expensive gym membership and spend $300 on new training gear of course!
Unfortunately, neither of those will make a difference unless you put your best foot forward and start working your own butt off. Worse, if you do not put that expensive membership and new gear to good use, you are only a few months (weeks?) away from saying, “I wish I didn’t spend all that money for nothing!”
I fear I am about to upset a few people by stating the following: good cyber health and hygiene is a lot like personal health and weight management. It takes time, effort, and dedication to keep in top form and it is also very easy to go off the rails if you do not watch what you’re doing. Furthermore, each time you go off the rails it becomes harder and harder to get back to the good form. And the only real difference between your health and cyberspace is that you can at least upgrade your device or operating system, whereas when it comes to our personal health, we are stuck with the same body and brain for our entire lives.
Wasting your time and money on the latest fad exercise machine or diet will be just that, a waste of time and money, especially if you are not ready to put yourself through the daily grind. Same goes for cyber tools that promise you a path to the mythical place known as CybersecureLand, a place where you can click on any link without any fear because the magical Fairy Cybermother will protect you and whisk any malicious code back to the depths of Maldorware.
This is uncharacteristic of me, but I will delve into the personal to illustrate my point. There was a time in my life where I had a slightly different “shape” (okay, more than slightly). This shape was unhealthy and thankfully I realized that if I were to keep this shape for any prolonged period of time, I would be down the road to a full network malfunction where even a full system reboot would do little for me. So what did I do? I said, “George, clean yourself up.”
How did I do this?