Bite-Sized Cyber Essentials: A Guide
We've researched and curated this helpful Guide designed to help anyone understand the essential information they need to incrementally level up privacy and security - at work and at home.
If people put such importance on online privacy, why do they relinquish their data, and control over it, so readily and easily? There is a term for this known as the privacy paradox.
There are numerous reasons individuals fall into this paradox, a common reason being the cyber environment itself: it’s difficult and complicated to navigate and understand.
The online landscape has increased exponentially in both size and complexity. As a result, learning how to navigate it safely has become increasingly difficult.
Many users no longer want to go through the hassle and time to ensure their security and privacy. The following are common traps people will fall into regarding cybersecurity hygiene:
 |  |  |  |
| MYTH: It's impossible, and useless, to reasonably protect myself from cyber criminals | MYTH: I'm too small and insignificant of a target for the bad guys to care about me | MYTH: It takes too much time to go through all the settings to manage and access permissions | MYTH: You have to be a cyber expert to know how to protect yourself |
| BUSTED: By simply following a few simple cyber practices, you can easily reduce your likelihood of being targeted by cyber criminals. It is only impossible to perfectly protect yourself, since there will always be risk in any daily activity. | BUSTED: For cyber criminals, a 0.1% success rate is still a victory. Hackers want your organization’s data, too. Everyone is a target who needs layers of protection. | BUSTED: This all comes down to risk tolerance, but there are quick and easy ways to mitigate the invasion of privacy. | BUSTED: You do NOT have to be a cybersecurity expert to protect yourself. The average user can take reasonable efforts to protect themselves with relatively minor changes in daily activities. |
There are endless articles, books, and guides available to read on how to improve cybersecurity, so what makes this one any different?
On one hand, there are many articles out there that prove to be unreliable due to misinformation, sponsors, and dishonest advertising.
On the other, there are plenty of articles articles that are long, boring, or require a deeper understanding of the subject material. This makes it difficult to find a simple, accurate, and objective guide to understanding the basics of cyber hygiene, and how to improve it effectively.
Echelon provides a breakdown of guides and considerations that you can take, today, to increase your security awareness and cyber hygiene to reduce your chances of becoming the victim of a cyber attack.
Like any of the security measures explained in our guides, simply following one of these practices is an incremental step in reducing your level of vulnerability and risk, putting you in a better cybersecurity posture. In order to increase your security and privacy, a layered approach is the most recommended method, and implementing these ideas one at a time will help you continuously level up.
In addition, you do not need to spend the next 24 hours fearing and stressing about implementing everything you read here. You can go through these guidelines at your leisure and refer back to them any time, knowing that each change you make is one additional layer to increasing your security.