Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Anna edited this page Sep 29, 2015 · 33 revisions

#Security Best Practices An Incomplete Security and Privacy Guide for the Masses

##About

This guide is intended to help people who care about their online security and privacy but need more information to make better security-aware decisions.

##Goals

Often with security and privacy concerns there exist trade-offs with usability and complexity. The most secure user is often the one who doesn't use the Internet, but if you would like to climb out from under your rock to join the rest of us on the Internet, this guide is here to help you. Getting to a point where you can be reasonably confident in your personal security and privacy online can take a lot of effort, due diligence, and technical vigilance.

##Advice

All of the items in this guide can be overwhelming. Don't treat these items as hard and fast rules to tackle all at once, rather over time do your best to improve your overall personal security and privacy by implementing and trying out more of these practices. Once you have tried many of them out, you can then decide for yourself what your security and privacy needs are compared to the relative inconvenience and acceptance for the listed threats.

##Topics

  1. Passwords
  2. Password Managers
  3. Updates
  4. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
  5. Social Media and Dating Sites
  6. Social Engineering
  7. Travelling Safely
  8. Browser Security
  9. Parents
  10. SSL /TLS
  11. Email
  12. Text Messaging SMS
  13. Chat (Gtalk / other messengers)
  14. Local Storage
  15. Wireless Networks
  16. Windows Desktop
  17. Mac OS
  18. iOS Mobile Devices
  19. Android Mobile Devices
  20. Backups
  21. GPS Tagging
  22. VPN
  23. Tor

##Additional Resources and References

  1. https://gist.github.com/grugq/353b6fc9b094d5700c70 - Point form quick free security advice. Some points come from this source but are expanded on for more accessibility
  2. https://storify.com/thegrugq/opsec-for-dating-websites - Specific advice for online dating safety
  3. http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/bsidessf2015/201-fck-these-guys-practical-countersurveillance-lisa-lorenzin -- Still need to pull a few apps mentioned in this talk out and include them.

##Document Status This resource is a living document. It may never be fully complete, rather a guide that gets better and evolves over time. In this first iteration, the goal is to provide a very high-level overview of security and privacy threats in a broad area of topics. At this time this may mean that the solutions to implementing many of these best practices may require additional research and Googling. In time, this guide will include more resources, complete how-to's, along with anecdotes and stories to provide more context to users as to why taking these personal privacy and security measures are important. We hope you find this helpful.

##Contributing Contributions are always welcome and appreciated. At this time please feel free to raise an issue or submit content/comments/questions through the issues section. In some ways we want to ensure the document has a reasonably consistent tone/feel so for the time being we will be leaving it in a closed wiki format. Eventually the pages may be mature enough to be moved to files within the repository, after which time we will be accepting pull requests. Thank you for your support.

Clone this wiki locally