Advice to Consumers

Abstract

The root causes of breach that we outlined in Chapter 1 are responsible for security breaches across industries and in both enterprise and government entities. But what’s more troubling is that these breaches are often the result of an organization’s insufficient actions or failure to take action to fully address the root causes of breach. In this chapter, we turn our focus to the rest of us, from enterprises to consumers. We will use the term consumer to reflect the reality that we not only consume physical goods and services but also digital content at an ever-accelerating rate. The Internet, wearables, and mobile apps have become an integral part of our lives. These devices even help us while we sleep by measuring our heart rate, quality of sleep, and even our brain waves. We are woken up by our alerts and status check-ins, reminded to meditate or exercise, and even coached on what to eat and how much water to consume in one day by our smartphones. It’s clear that the digital world helps manage many aspects of our lives.