Mike Juliett Kilo - Member

@Rich thanks for this topic! This is very near and dear to me since I really upgraded my digital preparedness last year due to the nature of my work. I have access to many personally identifying information streams and as such I have to take precautions that many wouldn’t have to. In general though I see this all as preparedness against a phisher, a hacker, an attacker, coffee shops, or someone stealing my laptop. These are the things I mostly did to improve privacy but mostly security focused. In addition to what you have above these are really important for me to do: Auditing my browser extensions once in a while. Only trusted ones. They collect lots of information and as a result I’d rather just not be tracked. A VPN Service. This becomes very important in a coffee shop wifi. The fact is that if you use an unsecured wifi (perhaps if you are bugging out) people can watch that traffic. It’s very easy. VPN ensures that nobody can inspect your traffic. It used to be very easy to login to people’s facebook accounts over unsecured wifi for instance. No real social media info. The fact is that with my name, my birthday, and my zipcode you can most likely track me down fairly easily. This can be a real problem for phishing attacks. Also Phishers will go onto facebook and see what you like or dislike and use that to get information. No social media public comments. Same reason as above. The fact is that Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter own what you say and can do whatever you want with it. Just don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to world to hear. Don’t use SMS for 2fa. Get a yubikey, or a secret google voice number. The reason is that it’s very easy to fake an SMS text message. Remove unused programs. This is so important, a lot of the time the biggest security threats are what we don’t realize are there. More _intense_ security measures if someone chooses: Protonmail or owning their own email server. Email is not a very secure protocol fundamentally, mainly cause it’s very very old. Protonmail is what I use because I’d prefer things to be securely stored. I saw someone else mention Signal. I really like it, it’s encrypted. Also iMessage is encrypted. Apple is actually really good about securing things. Android not as much surprisingly. Encryption of Hard Disk. The thing is while many of us have passwords on our computers it’s actually incredibly easy to open up a disk (even if it’s pretty badly damanged) and take whatever someone feels off of it. Since I scan all my financial documents and keep a backup this is really important to me. Use a traditional password on your phone unlock. I think someone else mentioned this but you cannot be forced to unlock something with a password. But you can be force to put your fingerprint on something. Legally that is. Change your router password please. There’s a wordlist out there of the most common passwords used in routers and it’s generally “password” or some equivalent :-D. Hide your wifi router SSID. With a kali linux distribution and a good enough wifi dongle it’s not entirely impossible to break into someone’s wifi. That means someone could be eavesdropping, again not good Disable flash in the browser. This is important because flash is an outdated technology and has some vulnerabilities that can turn your computer into a zombie if you run windows. There’s more suggestions I could add here but at some point it stops paying major dividends for most folks. I also think that some of the tactics to increase cybersecurity can actually do more harm than good. For instance getting rid of all phones for dumb phones, or only using tor, or using crypto currencies. Though it depends on the situation one is in, there are folks I know overseas that need to use these tactics. Again great topic hope this is helpful! Nice to hear someone else thinking along these lines and love this forum already you all :).