You're Already a Target

Corey White was crossing a college campus in the rain when a station wagon put him on its hood. He had the right of way. Cars always stopped. Until one didn't.

That is how most people use the internet right now.

In 2024, Americans lost $47 billion to identity fraud and scams. A single breach exposed 2.9 billion records, offered first for $3.5 million and then released free. Your name, your address, your date of birth, your social security number: for most people, that information is already public and already indexed.

And the attackers just got an upgrade. In one documented campaign, AI carried out 80 to 90 percent of the operation on its own, with humans stepping in only at a few decision points. Mentions of malicious AI tools on criminal forums rose 219 percent in a single year. The skill required to run a convincing attack has collapsed to almost nothing.

You are not too small to target. You are exactly the right size.

This is not a book about firewalls, and it is not written for IT departments. It is a sequence of things you can actually finish, most of them over a weekend, in plain language, with no jargon and nothing to install that you will not understand.

• Your evil digital twin, and the data already public about you
• Why your bank will not save you, and what to do instead
• Passwords are dead. What replaced them, and how to switch
• Phishing, smishing, vishing, quishing: one click is all they need
• How to protect your children, and how to protect your parents
• The insurance you do not have but need the most

The parent watching a kid grow up on AI chatbots. The adult child worried a cloned voice will talk their father into wiring money. The small business owner who became the number one target and has not been told yet. Anyone who has ever thought "there is nothing worth stealing from me" and would like to find out why that is wrong.

Corey White has spent thirty years in cybersecurity. At Cylance he was a founding executive and created ThreatZERO, one of the industry's first outcome-based security services. He then founded Cyvatar, which over seven years protected more than two hundred organizations with zero reported major customer breaches, reached number 605 on the Inc. 5000, and was ranked number one in Security and Privacy Services on G2. He founded, scaled and sold the company.

He now runs Cythentic, where he builds consumer cybersecurity for individuals, families and solopreneurs. This book is that same work in print.