Auditing your security
IS IT TIME TO CHECK THE LOCKS ON YOUR HOME NETWORK?
MOST BUSINESSES OF any size now regularly go through a cyber security audit, where the company’s activities are checked against good practice and vulnerabilities and risks are identified so that they can be mitigated. Most home networks never experience that – and they really should.
While home users can’t be expected to hire a team of penetration testers to go over their digital lives with a fine-toothed comb, it’s still a good idea to run an annual audit on your own digital equipment. It’s mostly just checking that you and your family are engaging in good practice to ensure that the risk of being hacked, of having your identity stolen or your important memories lost are minimised.
We’ve put together here a quick ten point checklist that you can use if you want to make sure you’re as secure as possible. We’d recommend running through it at least once a year, just to make sure you’re doing things right.
HAVE I CHECKED MY PASSWORDS?
A password audit for you and your family members is essential. There are two key questions: 1) does every site have a unique password; and 2) are the passwords good – meaning at least twelve characters long and being comprised of random numbers, letters and characters?
If there’s one security practice we recommend everybody do, it’s have a password manager. It’s the only reasonable way to enable you to meet those targets. So make sure everybody in your house uses a password manager, and make sure that they change the master password for the manager once every year. You can also use the password manager to quickly check if there are passwords being used for multiple sites, and if there are, then change them.
HAVE I ENABLED 2FA FOR EVERYTHING I CAN?
Two-factor authentication (2FA) means that a password alone is not enough to access a service. It also requires something else – most commonly access to a specific mobile phone. Typically it means that when you try and log into a service, a message will be sent to your phone requesting approval for the log in.
Many services, including all the biggies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and LastPass, support 2FA. Go through all the services that you commonly use and trust personal data to and enable 2FA on that service. Make sure your family has as well.
IS MY NETWORK SECURE?
Network security is a tough one. It’s hard for a layperson to know just how secure their home network is. There are plenty of network security tools available (Nagios, WireShark, various other Nmap-based tools) but most require some pretty high level knowledge to operate.
For a quick check, we’d recommend heading to www.ipv6scanner.com, which is a site where you can enter your IP address and it will scan your network for common vulnerabilities. Another good option is hidemyna.me/en/
ports/. If you find a port is not filtered or closed, then you have an application that is making your network vulnerable and you need to find and fix that app.
Also, take this moment to change your WiFi password and ensure that you’re using WPA2 or WPA3 security. See our notes on good passwords above.
HAVE I LOCKED DOWN SOCIAL MEDIA?
Once every year you should check the security settings on your social media accounts. They’re changing all the time, so you need to keep updating them. If you have kids, you should also check that they’re not oversharing personal information (check their feeds) and that their security settings are also tight.
This extends to services like Google, Apple and Microsoft, which by default gather a tonne of information on every user – but if you dive into their account settings you can turn a lot of that off. You should also check which third-party services have permissions
(go to myaccount.google.com/permissions, for example) and disable any you don’t use.
ARE MY PHONES SECURE?
Make sure all your phones and tablets have lock screens enabled and change the codes once every year (and don’t use 1234 as your pin!).
Enable remote lock and wipe on your Android and iOS phones, and do a check on app permissions. Tap on each app in the phone settings and make sure they don’t have unnecessary access to microphone, camera, location, contacts or SMS.
DO ALL MY PCS HAVE SECURITY SOFTWARE?
Make sure that every PC in your home has, at the very least, anti-malware installed and active. We strongly recommend a suite subscription – one can be had for about $100 a year, and will typically cover multiple PCs depending on the license. Suites cover much more than just viruses – they also protect you from hackers, identity theft, ransomware and much more.
IS MY SOFTWARE UP TO DATE?
Make sure that all the apps that you use are running the latest versions. Typically this is not a big issue on mobiles – unless you sideload apps on Android – but on PC a lot of apps still don’t automatically update.
There are a number of good software updater tools that will audit your installs automatically. We like Patch My PC ( patchmypc.com) since it’s portable and fast, but you may find other options more to your liking.
HAVE I SCRUBBED MY SYSTEM AND REMOVED UNUSED SOFTWARE RECENTLY?
Sometimes a system just needs a good cleanup. Once a year go through your Windows programs and uninstall any you don’t use (you can actually do this in Patch My PC or Glary Utilities). Then run CCleaner ( www.ccleaner.
com) or Glary Utilities ( www.glarysoft.com) to give your system a clean out, deleting unused and duplicate files and overwriting tracks to prevent file recovery.
ARE MY IMPORTANT FILES BEING BACKED UP?
Have you checked how your backups are doing? Are you even doing backups? Are all your devices being backed up? These are the questions you need to be able to answer. You should check the last date of your backups, and whether all your critical files and photos are safe – including those stored on your phone. If your PC or phone died today, how much would you lose?
If you find that whatever you’re doing now is not capturing all that information, then you should set about fixing that. Online backup services are a very convenient way to do that – we highly recommend Acronis, but other services like Backblaze or Google Backup and Sync can work as well.
WHERE IS MY DATA STORED AND WHO CAN ACCESS IT?
Finally, you should check where your data is being kept – and who can access that store. If you’re like most people, you probably have bits of data stored here and there: some on your phone, some on your PC, some on random flash drives, some on cloud services. Knowing where it all is it critical to be able to protect it and back it up. So take the time to figure out where all your files and photos are stored, and consider whether the data is safe and backed up where it is. Consolidate the data if necessary, and, per the point above, make sure it is all backed up!