Module 1: Nobody Picked You
Module 1: Nobody Picked You
If you picture a hacker at all, you probably picture someone in a dark room, staring at a screen, working on getting into your accounts. That picture is wrong, and the wrongness matters. It makes real protection feel hopeless (“if someone that determined comes after me, what could I do?”) and fake protection feel adequate (“who would bother targeting me anyway?”).
This module replaces the movie version with the real one. Nobody picked you. Your accounts are attacked by software, at enormous scale, using passwords that leaked from other websites. Every defense this course teaches works because of that fact.
Three short lessons and one exercise:
- Nobody Picked You — how a company that was never hacked lost 6.9 million customer profiles, and what was really attacking it
- What “Leaked in a Breach” Actually Means — what’s inside a breach dump, why old leaks never die, and the public record you can check
- Your Email Is the Master Key — why one account outranks all the others, and which of yours matter most
- Map Your Own Keys — a ten-minute exercise plus a knowledge check
What you’ll walk away with
- A truer mental model: machines working through lists, not people choosing victims
- The reason a password you used on two sites is a bigger risk than almost anything else
- Your own written list of high-value accounts — the exact list Modules 2 and 3 will secure first
Time
About 30 minutes. Every later module builds on the list you make in Lesson 1.4, so don’t skip it.