Basic security hygiene apps & tools in 2020

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

Hey! My name is Alex, I’m a Data Scientist working in cyber-security since 2019. I wanna share my shortlist of must-have tools and apps you can use to increase your privacy protection. Open-source only!

Web-browser

Browser is the main application for many of us, we search for information on the web, watching videos, communicating with friends, using online-banking. So your browser knows pretty much everything about you. Here are two must-have browser extensions you need to use on an everyday basis to keep your privacy and protect your data.

HTTPS everywhere

Source: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

It’s always a good idea to encrypt your traffic, so even if someone will capture your traffic, it will be not easy for them to read it, even for your internet provider.

Ghostery

Source: https://www.ghostery.com/

Almost every web-site nowadays is using trackers, often even several different trackers on the same page. When I’m writing this post, I can see how Medium is using Google Analytics. I’m generally against of idea that every web-site will collect data about my browsing habits. Ghostery is an efficient and clean way do stop that.

Tor Browser

source: https://www.torproject.org/

I’m not always using the Tor browser, let’s be honest it’s not so pleasant to use as the main browser. My main use-case for Tor is when I’m outside from home and have to use public WiFi, for example at the airport, especially if I need to access online banking or other sensitive data.

Passwords

Using the same password everywhere is a sure way to share your private data with the rest of the words. For example, you register on some website with the same password as your email, suppose they have data breaching, so now all your other accounts are compromised. Don’t trust websites, even the biggest company with huge professionals cyber-security departments has data breaches at some point. So the best way to protect yourself is to use different passwords everywhere.

Of course, it’s not possible to remember all your passwords, especially if they randomly generated, and writing it on a paper is also a bad idea. So here is password managers are coming to place. Computerphile has a great video about it.

Bitwarden

Source: https://bitwarden.com/

There are many different password managers from you can choose. I personally Bitwarden, it’s open-source, it’s clean looking and it has a command-line interface, which sometimes can be useful.

Note-taking apps

As a taking notes app, I can recommend open-source Joplin

Joplin

source: https://joplinapp.org/

Joplin has the option to enable end-2-end encryption, moreover, you can choose where to store your data, Joplin can be synchronized with different cloud services. Even if your cloud will be hacked all your notes will be encrypted.

Messengers

If you care about your privacy I suggest you to stop using mainstream messengers and instead look at the following apps:

Wickr, Signal, and Telegram (secret chats only)

They all have their pros and cons but in terms of security, all of them will keep your private data safe.

Thanks for reading! What're your favorite apps