What Is Cyber Hygiene?

Updated on November 15, 2023.

Cyber hygiene refers to cybersecurity best practices that both businesses and individuals implement to maintain the security and health of their online accounts, networks and devices. Good cyber hygiene protects individuals from common cyber threats that target them and their sensitive data.

Continue reading to learn more about cyber hygiene, its importance and how you can benefit from practicing good cyber hygiene. 

The Importance of Cyber Hygiene

Cyber hygiene is important for everyone to practice because it can help prevent you from becoming a victim of common cyber attacks. When people don’t practice good cyber hygiene, the dangers that lurk online can make them a target and place their sensitive data at risk of becoming compromised. When your sensitive information becomes compromised, cybercriminals can use it to steal your identity and your money. 

Anyone who uses the internet should be practicing and implementing good cyber hygiene to prevent cyber attacks, or at least lessen the damage if one were to occur. 

What Is Considered Good Cyber Hygiene?

Practicing cybersecurity best practices like having Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enabled on any accounts where it’s an option, using strong passwords, regularly backing up your data in a secure location, and regularly updating your software and devices are all considered good cyber hygiene. 

Having MFA enabled on accounts

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is an authentication method used to verify your identity. With MFA, two or more authentication methods are required before you can successfully log in to an account. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) falls under MFA, however, 2FA only requires one additional authentication method in addition to from your username and password.

Some examples of MFA methods include the following:

• Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) codes
• Authenticator apps
• Biometric authentication
• Hardware security keys 
• Security questions

MFA is important to enable because it ensures that no one but you will be able to access your accounts. If a cybercriminal were able to crack or guess your password, if you have MFA enabled, they would still need to authenticate who they are with the second factor, which only you can do. 

Using strong, random passwords

Using strong, random passwords for each of your accounts is also crucial to practicing good cyber hygiene. Each of the passwords you use should follow password best practices. This means they should be at least 16 characters long and include a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers. Your passwords should also never be reused across multiple accounts or use common phrases and words that someone or a machine would be able to guess. 

A good way to ensure that you’re always following password best practices is by using a password generator to create your passwords and using a password manager to securely store them. 

A password manager is a tool that generates, stores and protects all your passwords in a cloud-based vault. When you use a password manager, the only password you have to remember is your master password, which acts as the key to enter your vault. 

Regularly updating your software and devices

Regularly updating your software is something you should always do because these updates provide more than just new features. Software updates are important because they patch security flaws that cybercriminals can take advantage of, fix bug issues and improve the overall performance of your software or device. 

As soon as an update becomes available, you need to download it to ensure that cybercriminals won’t be able to find a vulnerability to infect your device with malicious software. 

Regularly backing up your data

Backing up your data is crucial to ensure that you’ll always have access to it, no matter what happens. In the case that your device were to become infected with malware – which, depending on the type, can restrict access to your data and sometimes block it entirely – backing up your data guarantees that you’ll always be able to access it. 

One way you can back up your data securely is by storing it in encrypted cloud storage. Cloud storage is a service that keeps all of your data “in the cloud.” This means you’ll be able to access your data from anywhere, and on any device, as long as you are connected to the internet. When a cloud storage service provider is encrypted, this means that all of your stored data is turned into ciphertext, which is an unreadable format. Having your data encrypted prevents it from getting into the wrong hands since only you’ll have the means to decrypt your stored data with an encryption key, which is usually your password and MFA, if you choose to enable it. 

The Benefits of Good Cyber Hygiene

Three main benefits of having good cyber hygiene are that it keeps your devices running well, it safeguards you against common cyber threats and it helps prevent account compromise. 

Keeps devices running well

When we consistently ignore new software updates, we’re doing more harm than good to our devices. It’s important to update your software whenever updates become available. Not only will updates patch existing security flaws, but they also keep your devices running properly. This is because your device gets all the new updates it needs to be running as it should be. Ignoring these updates can cause your devices to overexert themselves and begin to lag or run slowly.

Safeguards you against common cyber threats 

As cyber attacks continue to rise, it’s important to develop good cyber hygiene so you can protect yourself from becoming a victim of an attack. Implementing good cyber hygiene practices can aid you in lessening the damage of an attack, as well as the amount of data a cybercriminal can get away with. 

As a best practice, keep all your data in encrypted cloud storage to prevent cybercriminals from being able to access it. When cybercriminals can’t access your secured data, they can’t use it for malicious purposes.

Helps prevent account compromise

Since good cyber hygiene requires you to implement password best practices, you benefit by not having all of your online accounts become compromised. Although a single password of yours can become compromised due to a company experiencing a breach, only the account that was part of the breach would become compromised rather than all your other accounts that used that password too. 

This would not be the case if you reused the same password across multiple accounts, or variations of the same password, because a cybercriminal can use credential-stuffing techniques to compromise all of your online accounts that use the same password. Credential stuffing is when cybercriminals use a set of credentials to gain access to multiple accounts at once. 

How Keeper® Can Help You Maintain Good Cyber Hygiene

Keeper can help you maintain good cyber hygiene by ensuring that you’re always using strong passwords for your online accounts and helping you securely store your sensitive information. 

With Keeper, you’ll be able to generate strong passwords and store all your important data, including credentials, credit cards and more, in a secure vault that you’ll be able to access from anywhere with just your master password. Keeper uses zero-knowledge encryption to secure your data so you never have to worry about it getting into the hands of cybercriminals. 

Don’t let your cyber hygiene worsen because you don’t have the right cybersecurity tools. Keeper makes maintaining your cyber hygiene easy – get started for free today.