Improving my own personal Cyber Security at home

                     Despite being a Information security professional I have over the years neglected my own personnel security in various ways. However recently to get back on track and learn the latest trends I did a online course on Introduction to Cyber Security from FutureLearn. This opened my eyes in terms of the number of small and basic mistakes I am still committing in my personnel space of Cyber Security at home and with my personal dealings online. I will outline below the some of the basic mistakes and ways in which I corrected myself.

Bad Password Security
                     As most people I have accounts for a large number of sites online and have been very lax about my passwords storage and reuse. I was constantly reusing my passwords online, had stored my passwords on an excel sheet and written them on a diary. To obviate these problems I have recently bought and installed a Password manager LastPass which installed on all my devices including PC, Phone , Tablet and Laptop. On my first try of its security challenge it gave me a low score of 15 out of 100 for password reuse, weak passwords and old passwords. However since then I have used their automatic password change facility to change password on multiple sites and also manually changed passwords on other sites. The software generates strong passwords which it remembers and synchronizes across multiple devices. Another thing I have done is enable two factor authentication enabled on my important sites including Gmail, Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook which contain most of my personal data and are worthy of additional layer of protection.

Other security measures which I took are listed below

  • Use of Local not Administrator accounts on PCs 
  • Internet Security suites on PCs and mobile devices
  • Updating Software regularly on all devices 
  • Checking app settings on Mobile devices 
  • Updating my privacy settings on Facebook and Twitter.
I will write more about these topics in the coming days and the problems I encontered while implementing an effective personal cyber security plan. 


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