You’re using strong and unique passwords. You’re on the lookout for phishing emails. And you’ve set up two-factor authentication on every account that offers it. Basically, you’re acing Personal Cybersecurity 101. But with new threats popping up all the time, you may be looking for other steps you can take to protect yourself. Here’s an easy one: Clean up your digital junk.
Most people have old email accounts floating around, forgotten thumb drives in a drawer, and years-worth of crap in a downloads folder. All that stuff is a liability. Saving data that you want or that will someday come in handy is sort of the whole point of the digital revolution, but holding on to accounts and files that you don’t want anymore needlessly exposes you to all sorts of risks. Your devices can be lost or stolen (or hacked), and big companies can suffer data breaches that incidentally expose your information. So the less there is out there, the better off you are.
“The physical presence of data is so small that sometimes we don’t think about it as being clutter,” says Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance. “But we accumulate massive amounts of it, and some of it can be harmful if it gets lost or stolen.”
Here’s some tips from the experts on how to clean that clutter before it comes back to haunt you.
First, address your physical devices. Destroy old CDs, thumb drives, and external hard drives you don’t need anymore. (Don’t forget the box of floppy disks in your basement. Seriously.) Consider old PCs, gaming consoles, and smart home gadgets, and back up anything you want from those devices before wiping them. You can walk through tips on how to digitally and physically destroy data here, with bonus cleaning tips here.
Next, deal with your current devices. Sort through your desktop and clean out your documents folder. Eliminating old PDFs of credit card statements or medical forms that you no longer need will go a long way toward keeping you safer. And it’s a good opportunity to make a plan for sensitive documents that you do want to keep. You might back them up to a cloud service or a password-protected external hard drive and then take them off the devices you use every day that could be lost or stolen.
Source: Wired
