This started with a phone call my father didn't tell me about.
My name is Anthony Jackson. I built My Cyber Zen so you'd have somewhere calm to turn, before something happens to the people you're trying to protect.
While he was battling cancer, my father fell for a timeshare phone scam. Although we were close, he didn't tell me until long after the fact. My dad was a proud man and a relatively frugal man, and I think he was embarrassed. He shouldn't have been. These scams are designed by professionals to defeat smart, careful, proud people. The sense of urgency, the fear. That's the catch. That's how they get them.
But what I couldn't shake wasn't the scam itself. It was the gap. While he was battling cancer, he was also carrying this. He sorted through the embarrassment alone, when his focus and energy belonged somewhere else entirely. And by the time I found out, there was nothing left for me to do but listen. I had years of IT experience and certifications. I knew exactly what had happened and exactly how to protect him from it ever happening again. And none of that mattered, because I was too late.
That gap is what My Cyber Zen is built from. Not the scam. The silence around it.
Calm. Practical. For both of you.
There's no shortage of cybersecurity content out there. Most of it uses the same weapon scammers use: fear. "The hackers are coming. You're not ready. Here's what you're missing." My Cyber Zen doesn't do that.
This is calm, practical cybersecurity education for seniors and the adult children who worry about them. One email a week. Plain language. Real, specific threats explained the way you'd explain them to someone you care about over coffee. No jargon as a credential flex. No affiliate links, ever. No urgency theater.
My Cyber Zen is not enterprise IT consulting. It's not a tool-review blog. It is not fear-based content wearing calm language as a costume.
It's built for two readers at once: the adult child carrying the quiet worry of someone who knows their parents are being targeted, and the senior parent who wants to feel confident, not afraid. Every piece of content here is written so both of you can read it and neither of you feels talked past.
The goal is always the same. Give you one thing you can actually do, this weekend, on the next phone call, the next time something looks off, that protects the people you love.
My whole career has been about translation.
For 11 years, I supported a statewide crisis-management SaaS platform serving multiple state and municipal clients simultaneously: Georgia, Virginia, Baltimore, cities in New Mexico. Each with their own workflows, priorities, and escalation needs for thousands of users. I sat across from state officials and hospital administrators, figured out what they actually needed, then turned around and made sure the engineering teams understood what to build and why it mattered. Critical system downtime dropped 65%, not because I resolved tickets faster, but because I spotted the patterns and drove the fixes through.
The stakes of that platform were not abstract. When the GPS dispatch module went down, mobile crisis teams couldn't receive assignments. When the bed registry showed stale data, call center agents were making referrals to facilities that couldn't take the person, during live calls with people in mental health crisis. I spent 11 years learning what it really means when a system fails someone at the wrong moment.
That's what scams do to seniors. They fail them at the wrong moment. And the people who love them find out too late.
I hold CompTIA Security+, ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC), and Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) credentials, with a CCNA and a B.S. in Computer Information Technology. But the credential that matters most for this work is the one I can't put on a resume: the gap my father left, and everything I've built since.
Three ways to work together.
One email, every Monday. One cybersecurity topic that matters to families, explained plainly, with one thing you can do about it. No spam. No affiliate links. No fear.
Subscribe Free →Cyber Safe Seniors: The Weekend Protection Program. Seven modules, 22 lessons, 21 worksheets. Built so a senior and their adult child can go through it together over one weekend.
Take a Look →For community leaders, elected officials, and senior advocacy organizations who want trusted, anti-fear cybersecurity education for the people they serve.
Learn More →If your parents are still around, you have something I don't anymore: time to have the conversation.
What's keeping you up at night about this? I'm curious to know.