Everyone is out to get you, all the time. It can get tiring hearing this message. The fact of the matter is that because we live quite a bit of our lives online, being cybersecurity-aware is something that we all need to be active participants in.
Ensuring that your own personal setup (cloud service, email, personal information, etc.) is secure is an absolute, but bloody hell, it can be tiring if you have to commit too much mental energy to it. I don’t like overexerting myself when it comes to my cybersecurity setup, but when I do something related to my cyber safety, I do make sure that it’s effective. This is a situation where the philosophy of “work smarter, not harder” definitely comes into play.
Software updates are low-hanging fruit
This, by far and away, is simultaneously the easiest and most effective way to keep your technological infrastructure secure. Updates come out every other day, and trying to keep up with updating every single app would end up driving you crazy. That being said, you can set it up so that your device auto-updates all of the apps on it. This cuts down the number of times you need to check for updates.
Why is this important? Most of the updates that you will see nowadays will have some sort of security update associated with them. If you’re interested, you can check the description of what the update is (and I do, in fact, do this… just because I’m curious), and it will tell you something about either new features that they are implementing or a security update. Most of the time, it’s a security thing. Keeping all your programs up to date is an effortless way to defend yourself from cyberattacks.
Use a password manager
I can’t explain how much time, effort, and brain space this has saved me over the past few years. I used to have to deal with passwords everywhere I went, and while passwords used to be simple and fairly common, most of mine are complex, long, and very different from each other.
Trying to remember all of them is impossible, so I don’t. Having a password manager remember all of your passwords for you makes it so that you can make them as complex and crazy as your heart desires. So long as you save them in your password manager, and that password manager is on all your devices, you should be able to access any system you need to without having to worry about what the password is for every single account.
2FA everywhere
This may sound counter to the “making your cybersecurity setup easier” philosophy, but I swear it’s not. While I recognize that adding 2FA is an extra step to sign into things, the reality is much different.
What 2FA does is secure all of your critical systems. Things like your cloud accounts, where you keep your data; your online banking, where your financial world is; and social media, where you have all manner of personal data about yourself, all need to be secured. 2FA is the best way to do that.
Regular backups save you more than you know
One thing I try to do (yes, sometimes even I mess this one up) is back up my filing system somewhere. I usually have an external hard drive where I back it up, so that in a case where something happens to my data, I should have a copy that will be able to replace it.
I say this because there was a time when I actually DID need to use my backup. No, I wasn’t hacked or anything. It was actually worse. I was a bonehead. I was fiddling around with some of the settings on my phone and I was trying to clear up some memory, and I clicked a few things and deleted some stuff. Only later did it occur to me that I may have deleted something I actually did want, and it turns out I deleted my entire filing system!
Luckily, I was able to get it all back as I’d backed up only a week or so before, but it’s important to be able to back up your system. There are (apparently) not only external threats, but internal ones as well.
VPNs are your friend
Virtual Private Networks are super cool. I’ve started using one and it’s been super helpful. The way that VPNs work is that they encrypt your data at the endpoint where you’re accessing it (say, for example, your phone), and it makes it so that the data you are sending and receiving can’t be stolen. This is super cool, but also slightly technical and boring. The fun part is that if there are shows that you want to watch in a country that you aren’t in, and they aren’t available in your country, then you can quite simply switch the country that your device is claiming to be in, and you will be able to watch those shows.
The perfect example of this happened a couple of years ago. My wife and I were traveling and she found a dress she liked online. She sent me the link but said that the dress was super expensive. When I got the link, it showed the dress as only being like $100.00. When I asked her about it, she showed me her phone and it showed a completely different price. That was because she hadn’t activated her VPN, so the price was showing up in the local currency.
I can’t tell you the number of people I have encountered who didn’t really feel like dealing with all the setup and whatnot around cybersecurity, but I will say that the vast majority of the population wants their technology to “just work.” On the one hand, I completely agree, but the problem is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, then you won’t know if it’s broken.
Having a seriously robust cybersecurity setup is really easy to set up and maintain. Getting the tools and practices in place is just a matter of a little configuration and making sure you are following your own rules. After a while, it just becomes easy. Making it so that you don’t have to spend every day thinking about your security means that you can spend your time doing the things you want to do. In order to get there, you need to spend some time on it.
How do you feel about your security setup?
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