Technology & Coding

Cybersecurity Basics for Everyday Life

Lock down your accounts, spot scams before they land, and stop treating your own devices as trustworthy by default.

This course is for members

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What you will learn about Cybersecurity Basics for Everyday Life

The 7-day sprint
  1. Your Email Is the Master Key. Your primary email account controls password resets for almost everything else, so it is the single account an attacker wants most.
  2. Passwords You Never Have To Remember. Password reuse, not password weakness, is what actually gets people hacked, and a password manager is the only practical way to make every password unique.
  3. Two Factors Beat One. Two-factor authentication means a stolen password is no longer enough to get in, and not all second factors are equally strong.
  4. How Phishing Actually Reads. Nearly every successful scam creates urgency about something you care about and then asks you to act through a link or number the scammer chose.
  5. Updates, Backups, and Ransom. Updates close the holes attackers already know about, and a backup you have tested is the only real answer to ransomware or a lost device.
  6. Networks, Browsers, and Data You Give Away. Your risk on other people's networks comes less from eavesdropping than from what your devices and browser reveal or accept automatically.
  7. When It Goes Wrong, Move In Order. Incident response is a fixed sequence, and doing the steps out of order is what turns a small compromise into a large one.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
  • Unique passwords, held by a manager
  • Two-factor authentication, ranked by phishing resistance
  • Verify through a channel you chose
  • Your email account is the root of trust
  • Patch and back up, because failure is a when
  • Reduce what you expose
  • Have a first-hour plan
The core idea, explained like you are 5

Authentication: proving you are who you claim to be, and the fact that anything you can hand over can also be handed over by someone who stole it.

Then the quiz and the ladder

10 questions that correct you when you are wrong, and beginner, intermediate, advanced levels, each with a practical exercise.