Good Digital Hygiene

When Hagel wrote this well-known statement, poor hygiene was not recognised as a contributing factor of disease. Several plagues devastated populations over the centuries and the measures taken by the medics of the time did not focus on hygiene – a surgeon would typically wash his hands after performing surgery, not before (and of course no anaesthesia or antisepsis).

Worse still, those in the medical profession who advocated hygiene (like Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, in Vienna, around 1840) lost their job by offending the medical establishment suggesting they should wash their hands. Then came Pasteur, Lister and many others and everything changed. Nevertheless, plagues continue to exist and hygiene remains an important factor. The problem however has not gone away: an article in Freakanomics published in 2012 entitled: “How to get doctors to wash their hands.”

We should also remember that bacteria and viruses have evolved in pace with new drugs to manage them and now we have resistant strains that don’t respond to available drugs. Hospital infections are found around the world.

As far as the author is concerned, poor digital hygiene, as introduced here, is at the stage comparable to that existed in Vienna when the Great Plague hit: people are unaware of the need to protect themselves and are not particularly bothered with digital hygiene despite many guidelines and good advice being readily available. In addition, malicious software such as viruses, worms, Trojan horses, etc., continue to evolve faster than the capability of protective products to detect them and clean them.

Every person has a role to play to prevent and/or reduce the impact of a cyber-plague. It may not kill millions of people but could make life quite uncomfortable.

1. A scary story for grown ups
2. The inhabitants of cyberspace’s hostile side
3. Good digital hygiene: the essentials
   1. Malicious software
   2. Anti-virus and Firewalls
   3. Use a vault
   4. Bad ideas
   5. Disposing of your devices
   6. Backups
   7. Passwords
   8. Personal Identification Numbers (PIN)
   9. Choosing software for your devices
   10. Downloads
   11. Sharing your devices
   12. Locking your devices when not in use
   13. Securing online transactions and “https”
4. Your footprints in cyberspace
   1. Who is watching your online activities?
   2. Your browser disclosures
   3. Your cookies
   4. Your disclosures
   5. What others may be saying about you
   6. Your IDs and privacy in cyberspace
   7. Being selective about who is in your network
   8. Social media and Internet Memory
5. Hygiene and the cyber-minefield
   1. Spam and scams
   2. Phishing and spear-phishing
   3. Attachments
   4. Click here to follow the link
   5. Unencrypted “free” WiFi (or WLAN)
   6. Encrypting your domestic WiFi
   7. Bluetooth
   8. Log out of everything you do online
6. Beyond the essentials
   1. Inventory of your devices
   2. Crapware, craplets and Scareware
   3. Inventory of all your accounts
   4. Lost your smartphone or your computer?
   5. Tracking software for electronic devices
   6. Remotely wipe the contents of your lost device
   7. Encryption and digital signatures
   8. Geo-tagging
   9. Legislation you should know about
   10. Jailbreaking or rooting your devices
7. Good hygiene in the future
   1. Coming your way: the Internet Of Things
   2. Digital hygiene in
8. In conclusion…
9. Other publications and websites
10. Acknowledgments