It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. What if the biggest problem we face when our computers or devices are hacked had nothing to do with technology at all?

In today's talk from cybersecurity strategist Nadia Bartol, we're asked to consider a different way of thinking about hacks.

Her 2021 talk from TED at BCG looks at cybersecurity

from a psychological perspective. Today, I'm going to talk about a shameful topic. This has

happened to many of us, and it's embarrassing, but if we don't talk about it,

nothing will ever change. It's about being hacked. Some of us have clicked on a phishing

link and downloaded a computer virus. Some of us have had our identities stolen. And those of us

who are software developers might have written in secure code with

security bugs in it without realizing it. As a cybersecurity expert, I have worked with

countless companies on improving their cybersecurity. Cybersecurity experts like me have advised

companies on good cybersecurity practices, monitoring tools, and proper user behaviors.

But I actually see a much bigger problem that no tool can fix. The shame associated with the

mistakes that we make. We like to think of ourselves as competent and tech savvy. And then we

make these mistakes, they can have a really

bad impact on us and our companies, anything from a simple annoyance to taking a lot of time to

fix, to costing us and our employers a lot of money. Despite billions of dollars that companies

spend on cybersecurity, practitioners like me see the same problems over and over again.

Let me give you some examples.

The 2015 hack of Ukrainian utilities, the disconnected power for 225,000 customers and took months

to restore back to full operations, started with a fishing link. By the way,

225,000 customers is a lot more than 225,000 people. Customers can be anything from an apartment

building to an industrial facility to a shopping mall. The 2017 data breach of Equifax

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