Dude. Most people can’t understand it TOADY.

Telegraph and wire transfers were a thing 100 years ago, you could say “Everyone have a telegraph at home. Private communication, for example orders to your bank to wire money, uses codes/cyphers that can be decoded if the third party was smart enough”.

You’d have to go back before the discovery of electricity, and even then you could make an analogy with lighthouses (which isn’t really a stretch, as fiber optic cables can be described as point-to-point light houses), and most people at most periods are probably familiar with the idea of talking in codes.

Technology isn’t really that hard to explain. Social change is much harder. Try explaining to someone from 1920 that the US had a black president and nothing catastrophical happened, or that all professions today are open to women and you’d have a much harder time.

So, you’ve got a name, a date of birth, an address and a whole lot of personal information and secrets, everybody’s got secrets. Let’s say there was a device that had a glass window that lit up and there were words and pictures on it. Now, let’s say that you wanted to share the latest [insert cultural reference from a century ago, lol] news with your buddies and your opinions. Let’s say you wanted to gamble, let’s say you wanted to communicate with them through this device. The medium you would be using is called email. Wayyy faster than a post master’s parcel or letter delivery. The channel or means to be able to communicate is called the Internet or the web. This name is given because it is a series of connections that allows you and your device to be linked to all the others.

Now, let’s say that Company A wants to sell some service through this device. You want it but you only have dollars and coins. Paper and metal money. It is easy to transfer information from one device to another but how will you get your money there. You can give it to the mailman but it would take too long and you still have to wait. So, you have this harder than paper card. With numbers on it, connected to a bank. You keep your money in their account but instead of taking it out physically, the number “registers” it as the money leaving the account and going to Company A so they can send you their product.

Well, your neighbor is jealous that you have so much money and packages coming to your door by way of automobile delivery or horse and carriage. They are sour because your grass is always fed the finest of plant food supplements. They are envious because your grass is literally greener but they cannot afford to pay for a device like yours let alone expensive plant food from Company A.

They decide to “steal” your device but it is locked inside your house. They go down to the pub and talk a bunch of shit to the barkeep. He says for a price he has a guy who can get the numbers for your account right off your device without the need to break into your house for a small price.

So, he pays him and you lose all your money. Your grass is dying and somehow your jobless, drunk slob of a neighbor starts having the greenest glowing grass. You get suspicious.

So you go down to the pub and drown your sorrows in booze with the last of your money. And the barkeep overhears you complaining. He says for a price, he can put some numbers and letters into your device and make it so no one, not even him can get in. This is his pitch. He says he will only charge a small fee per month for this. So you pay him with your last bit of coins.

Now, your neighbor can’t access your information without breaking into your home. Of course, you curse the makers of this device to begin with for not making their devices more secure in the first place. You wonder if they are all in kahoots with each other trying to make money off of every last thing. But nevertheless, you are happier, safer and more secure and soon you get paid and your jobless neighbor is soon broke and balance is restored. For now, until the barkeep decides to offer a better service to your neighbor.

That is what cybersecurity is and the simplest way to explain to someone from the 1920s, I guess. And the need for it to always have to improve.

Okay so imagine you have your gold in a bank.

And to get that gold, you need a piece of paper with some numbers.

That piece of paper is in your house and if you don’t lock it up, someone can take it, possibly someone you willingly let into your house.

Codebooks, codes and use of ephemisms to describe scertain things are very, very ancient.

Using electric machines with sophisticated software can be tough to explain, but I’m sure those who used cyphers to encrypt their messages as far as 18th century warfare or even earlier can get around that fancy thing that also does it for them for they don’t need to memorise anything.

Lock your doors. Guard your keys. Close your windows. Treat any other actions as calculated risks.

Nah. Fraud is fraud.

Yes, this document says it has this guy’s signature on it, but how do you know what his signature is meant to look like?

Same concept just scaled up.