Personal threat models and hardening your information to doxing

July 10, 2017 9:55 AM

Sean Gallagher delves into demystifying threat modelling, building from Adam Shostack's Privacy Threat Model for The People of Seattle and Electronic Frontier Foundation's five-question structure. For Sean, it comes down to answering four questions: Who am I, and what am I doing here? What could possibly go wrong? And how? Then, how much can I stand to do about it? Related: if online harassment crossing into your personal life is a concern, Nathan Mattise offers simple strategies that can minimize the physical toll of doxing.

If you want to skim to the highlights of personal threat modeling, Sean offers a TL;DR summary:

• Back up your stuff to the cloud or a disk drive you detach from your device;
• Use a password manager to automate your use of separate passwords for every website;
• Update your software whenever alerted to do so.

"Do those three things, and you're doing better than most," Shostack said.

And the highlights from Nate's article are:

• If you own a domain, protect the whois information;
• Obscure your private phone number as best as you can;
• "Enable two-factor authentication when possible and find a password manager that fits into your day-to-day."

posted by filthy light thief (5 comments total)

Two Factor Authentication is a Mess
posted by Artw at 10:17 AM on July 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

(Not an article suggesting you don't use it, more about how it isn't a silver bullet)
posted by Artw at 10:18 AM on July 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

The weakest link is always the biggest dingleberry who has your data. The data analyst who keeps a database of personal information on a laptop that they leave in their car, the retailer that stores their customer information unencrypted on an insecure server, or the clueless friend who gleefully downloads shitty little cellphone games that scrape their contacts.
posted by ernielundquist at 12:02 PM on July 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

I've had more trouble due to those big dingleberries than anything I've been doing or not doing to keep my stuff in order.
posted by infini at 12:47 PM on July 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

Back up your stuff to the cloud or a disk drive you detach from your device

Back up your stuff to the cloud and a disk drive you detach from your device, surely.
posted by flabdablet at 7:58 AM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]