Electronic Family Protection: Part Two, by Crusoe

Building upon the lessons learned in the GroundRod series these are logical next steps in hardening your family’s digital signature.  As always, I am a proponent of training and highly recommend what K has to offer at Combat Studies Group.

Your digital footprint is an accessible attack vector into your personal data.  Every day in the news cycle are stories of cyber criminals hacking and stealing information.

The gaining of passwords through social engineering is the weak link for most companies and you.  With a little bit of ingenuity and searching a criminal or terrorist can find an unsuspecting victim to target.  If they focus their attention on someone who has not taken any mitigation steps it is significantly easier to gain access to their data.  The goal is to be a hard target.

Passwords

• Most passwords can be broken within minutes by a smart/determined adversary.  4-digit pin codes can be broken within seconds (phone, ATM card, etc) and basic everyday passwords can be broken within minutes.  The password I used for everything (up until this class) can be hacked within 8 minutes.
• Switch your mindset from a password to a passphrase that is at least 16-20 characters and contains upper/lower case letters with numbers and symbols.
• As an example
  • Using a password strength website– https://bitwarden.com/password-strength/
    • “HotM0mm@615”   Rated strong taking 3 months to break with pre-quantum computing.
    • “J0b$eeker run Turtle world 9874”   Rated as strong and would take “centuries” to crack.

Not all sites will allow this long of a passphrase, but you can use the above link to find out if your chosen password or phrase is strong enough.

I am a fan of Bitwarden as a password manager that stores my information within a password protected vault.  It also has a password generator function that is helpful in creating new passwords.

Web Browsing

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is the next logical step. A VPN masks your IP address (IP). The information coming from your router to the internet service provider (ISP)…think Comcast, HughesNet, Verizon, etc…  It is not 100% fool proof at masking who you are without other mitigating steps, but it does start you down the right road.

Proton VPN is a solid choice, but there are many out there worthy of your investigation.  ProtonVPN has a free one that is pretty good.  Everyone likes free stuff, but I personally recommend the paid option.

Search Engines

Do not use Google!  The algorithm in most search engines that people use slants the results to match their narrative and to sell you stuff.  Search platforms are advertisement agencies at their core.

K Approved search engines that are worth looking at:

• Metager
• Swisscows
• Brave search
• Peekier
• Seekr (meter for political leaning)

Crusoe is retired from the Air Force after 30-years of service as a flight crew member.  He spends most of his time thinking about the apocalypse and how to mitigate its effects.  When not immersed in academic pursuits, he is often on a trail hiking in the mountains of North Georgia or reading with a glass of Irish whiskey and a German Shepherd by his side.   Global travel enthusiast, history nerd, Appalachian Trail thru hiker, and recovering ultra-endurance athlete.  He can be reached at [email protected]