Oh, No …Hacked Again!: A Story About Online Safety is about a girl that loses her game account because of a hacking website. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I wrote this book inspired by the experiences of my own children. During the pandemic, I noticed how my children were spending more time online gaming or for school. With that exposure, I also saw two of my children’s gaming accounts get hacked on more than one occasion. Their online experiences motivated me to write my 2nd children’s book “Oh, No… Hacked Again!” a story to teach children the important message of online safety.

As someone who is an immigrant Black woman who transitioned into cybersecurity from the legal field after moving to the US from Ethiopia 9 years ago, I quickly learned about the glaring lack of diversity within the industry. I hope to convey an important message through the story to spark interest in young readers, especially girls and girls who look like me, to consider cybersecurity as a meaningful career option.

What is a common misconception you feel people have about online safety?

People, have this misconception that out of a huge internet who would be interested in targeting me? Even if they do and become successful what valuable data would they be staking from me?

However, the fact of the matter is it isn’t about who the cybercriminals are targeting. Usually nothing personal and it doesn’t have to be big corporations or rich or celebrity folks. The bad guys are targeting everyone yes including common individuals using automation tools throwing their net to fish whatever sensitive information they could get their hands on exploiting any system’s vulnerabilities that we might have neglected or put off to update in any of our devices.

The other misconception is thinking that Usernames and passwords provide enough strong protection. When in fact in reality that isn’t the case. usernames and passwords are vulnerable to brute force attacks and can be compromised.

Attackers have tools to crack the passwords so it’s important to use a strong complex password and implement multi-factor authentication to plus to enhance your security by requiring a user to identify themselves by more than a username and password. It’s also vital that we don’t reuse our passwords and instead use a password manager because we don’t have to remember all the passwords we use to authenticate for the various devices.

What do you hope is one thing readers take away from this story?

It’s important that parents cultivate a culture of open communication with their children so that kids are comfortable sharing their online experiences with their parents should they encounter something out of the ordinary or they think they are getting in trouble. Its critical that we also instill a culture of having a security mindset and the importance of online safety to our kids, teach them not only the importance of not sharing our passwords, and any personal information with others, having strong passwords but also the importance of implementing Multi-factor authentication to help secure their online experiences be it for entertainment gaming or for school purposes. It is also meant to spark interest in o a possible career option in the field of cybersecurity fighting against cybercriminals and protecting sensitive data, especially of the most vulnerable population.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

May be 🙂 I am currently focusing this year on finishing my grad school program Masters’s degree in Cybersecurity at Georgia Tech University and promoting my two children’s books!

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