The Hackers Are Coming

Ronald Nutter

1) What inspired you to write the book?

Several people that I know have had one or more of their accounts compromised last year.  One of them had to shut his business down for several weeks to cleanup the mess that resulted. One of the methods more online services/websites are using to make it harder to get access to your accounts is using something called a security question.

The best thing you can do is to either give a made up answer or just enter a random but unique string of letters, numbers and/or punctuation characters.

When the security questions are used, the online service/website are looking for a match to the information you previously entered.  With security questions being used as an additional step during the login process or when trying to gain access to your account when you have forgotten the password, giving different answers to the same questions on different websites adds another layer of protection to keep someone from guessing their way into getting into your account.

2) What's been your biggest challenge as an author so far?

 

Finding a book title that grabs the readers attention and gets them to buy the book.  Since the bulk of my career has been in the I.T. arena, I have a tendency to give a book a title that accurately describes the information inside.  What it doesn't do is sell the “sizzle” of the meat or the information inside the book.  I had the good fortune of meeting someone who is very good at coming up with book titles and helping pick the right graphic for the cover of the book.  When you see the cover of the book “The Hackers Are Coming… How To Safely Surf The Internet” with the hook firmly inserted in the credit card does a much better job of getting the message across about how your money can be quickly stolen.

3) What's one thing you've celebrated or what's been a high point of writing your book?

 

Getting the book released so that I can help others avoid their accounts from being hacked.  I have been on several TV stations when one of the online services, Yahoo, announced a break-in of their service.  Instead of running for cover and just changing their password as most reports were saying to do, I was able to show advanced options which offered a higher level of protection.  Since that initial story came out, I was invited to come back into the TV studio at one of the stations by the Senior Evening Anchor where we spent close to an hour taping content that will be used in a future broadcast/special.

4) What's surprised you the most about writing your book?

How quickly I can write a book once I have an outline fleshed out.  In some cases, in making sure the outline is going to do the job, I have found that I need to add another chapter or two to properly address the subject the book covers.

  In most cases, I can write the main book outline in two to four hours.  In the case of one book, I had the entire book written in about 20 hours.

Not all books come out that quickly.  In the case of my books, which can be fairly technical at times, I repeat the steps I go over several times to make sure that what I outline should be consistent when the readers goes to replicate those steps.

5) What's one piece of advice you would give to aspiring authors?

Don't ever think you know everything about writing a book. You will always be in training for new technologies on better ways to write a book or reaching your desired target audience.  When you see a fellow author stumbling, offer to help them. If we all help each other, this will be a far better place.

When I wrote my first books close to 20 years ago, it was with the conventional publishing model where I was writing content several hours a night for several months, going through the technical edits, and then reviewing the galley proofs. After releasing two books that way, I promised that I would NEVER release a book that would take upwards of 9 months to write, edit and then publish.  When I found out about Kindle and the considerably streamlined method for writing a book that could be released in a matter of days, this was something that I had to look at closely.  As my experience grew, I then learned with a small additional effort, I could republish the kindle book into a paperback format without having to start from scratch.

Thank you, Ronald for sharing your story with us!

Enjoy!

Tamara