About Me – Brian Focht

My goal is to help individuals and businesses appreciate the importance of cybersecurity, which by necessity involves a combination of helping make it simpler, and explaining why it’s so complicated. Although those two ideas seem to be at odds with each other, a Sisyphean task of complicating what I just made simple, I believe there is no better way to make cybersecurity a bigger priority for everyone.

I am the author of Resilience Cybersecurity and Data Privacy, and a cybersecurity law and civil litigation attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to representing clients in numerous litigation matters related to cybersecurity, I also advise small businesses on various matters related to cybersecurity preparedness, cyber attack response, and insurance coverage for cybersecurity matters.

I promise to try and help make the workings of cybersecurity more accessible to those of us who are not in IT. On the other hand, I pledge to be honest about the matters for which even the best simplification still requires a computer science degree to understand. As such, my purpose is to instill upon you, the reader, my version of the Cybersecurity Serenity Prayer:

Grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change (like mandatory employee training),
The courage to change the things I can (like my old passwords),
And the Wisdom to know when to call IT.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying each hack-free moment at a time;
Accepting inconvenient security measures
As a pathway to fewer company-wide ransomware attacks; 

Taking the world (including its technology) as it is,
Not as it was before there were hackers and your phone contained your entire life;

Trusting that IT will make things right… or at least get them running again,
If I surrender my company’s systems to their will;

So that I may be reasonably less-stressed in this life
And able to focus on the things I enjoy… or at least to run my business.