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Personal securityBeginner

Digital Safety: Personal Hygiene

Passwords, second factors, phishing and devices for one ordinary person: what actually changes the odds, what has quietly been retired, and what to do in the first hour if an account is already gone

Digital Safety: Personal Hygiene

About this course

A course for a person, not for an administrator. Nobody here has a corporate policy, a security team or a spare evening. The assumption is the realistic one: you have about twenty minutes today, a phone, a laptop and thirty or forty accounts that grew up around one mailbox. The course says plainly which three measures do most of the work, in what order to apply them, and which widely repeated advice you can stop following.

Eleven lessons cover passwords and why length beats punctuation, password managers and the master password you must not lose, passkeys, two-factor authentication including the honest place of SMS codes, the mailbox that resets everything else, phishing that no longer has spelling mistakes, phone calls from the “security department”, breach notifications, updates, screen locks and disk encryption, public Wi-Fi as it really is today, backups by the 3-2-1 rule, privacy settings, and a step-by-step order for the day an account is stolen.

The guidance follows current practice rather than the folklore of ten years ago: no forced password changes on a schedule, no mandatory special characters, no secret questions, no scare stories about coffee-shop Wi-Fi, no claim that an antivirus is the centre of your defence. The tone is deliberately calm. The aim is not a frightened reader but a reader who finished the first module and has two-factor authentication switched on.

Course curriculum

  1. Passwords and the way you sign in

    What actually makes a password hard to break, why a manager is the only workable way to keep unique ones, and how signing in without a password works.

    • 1.Length beats character soup — and the three things to do first15 min
    • 2.A password manager: choosing one, the master password, and losing it14 min
    • 3.Passkeys: signing in without a password at all12 min

  2. The second factor and the account everything hangs on

    Two-factor authentication without dogma, the mailbox that resets every other account, and what a breach notification actually requires of you.

    • 1.Two-factor: an app, a key, backup codes — and where SMS honestly fits16 min
    • 2.Your mailbox is the master key14 min
    • 3.Breaches: check your addresses, then act in the right order13 min

  3. Deception: letters and voices

    Phishing that no longer looks like phishing, the checks that still work, and the phone call that asks you to hurry.

    • 1.Phishing today: why “just look at the address” is no longer enough16 min
    • 2.The call from the “security department”: urgency is the tell14 min

  4. Devices, connections and the day it goes wrong

    What actually protects a phone and a laptop, what public Wi-Fi and privacy settings are really worth, and the order of steps when an account is already stolen.

    • 1.Updates, locks and encryption: what actually protects a device15 min
    • 2.Public Wi-Fi and privacy: the real risks and the folklore13 min
    • 3.Backups that restore, and a stolen account step by step18 min