As Cybersecurity Awareness Month gets into Week 2, it’s important to do a quick stock take of our digital hygiene.
Digital housekeeping is essential for teams that are fast-moving and often wearing several hats. When juggling information management on shared platforms, coordinating social media and website updates, or organizing in group chats, it’s easy for best practices to slip through the cracks.
This week, we’re sharing five quick ways to keep your team’s digital house spick-and-span:
1. Manage Your Shared Drives
Fast-paced teams often use a mixture of personal and work accounts on the same devices. Over time, forgotten shared links and outdated folder permissions can leave open back-doors into your organization’s files.
- The Quick Fix: Conduct a 10-minute monthly audit of your shared drives. Remove old interns or past partners, and change folder settings from “Anyone with the link” to restricted access for specific email addresses only.
2. Lock Down Large Group Chats
Group chats on Signal or WhatsApp are great for coordinating field teams, volunteers, and coalition partners. However, open invite links can easily travel further than intended, allowing unvetted people to enter sensitive spaces.
- The Quick Fix: Turn on disappearing messages by default for project groups where necessary, disable open invite links (require an admin to approve new members), and periodically remove inactive members from field chats once a campaign wraps up. While disappearing messages reduce long-term exposure on devices, they do not prevent screenshots or forwarding and may conflict with record-keeping needs. Use them as a risk-reduction tool rather than a complete safety guarantee.
3. Audit Your Web Browsers and Extensions
We rely heavily on browser extensions for editing, translation, screenshots, and productivity. However, browser extensions often have permission to read all data on the websites you visit, and inactive ones rarely receive security patches.
- The Quick Fix: Open your browser’s extension manager (Chrome/Firefox/Edge) and remove any tools you haven’t used in the past month or quarter. Make it a rule to only install extensions from verified, well-reviewed developers.
4. Guard Your Phone Number Like a Gateway
In many regions, a personal phone number is tied to national ID registration, mobile money accounts, personal messaging apps, and recovery contacts. Listing a team member’s personal number on public press releases or event flyers exposes their entire digital footprint to web scrapers and bad actors.
- The Quick Fix: Keep a strict boundary between public contact details and personal SIMs. Where feasible, make sure to use a dedicated organizational phone number that is completely separate from any staff members.
5. Tidy Up “Public-Facing” Details
Adversaries often use public data to map out who works at an organization, who their family members are, and where they spend time. This information may seem harmless on its own, but it is frequently used for targeted impersonation, social engineering, or online harassment.
- The Quick Fix: Encourage team members to do a quick privacy audit on their personal social media profiles. Ensure friend lists, family tags, and location histories are set to private or restricted to trusted contacts only.
Protecting our digital spaces is a collective effort that starts with the smallest details. When everyone takes ownership of their digital footprint, the whole organization stays secure. Let’s keep building strong habits together, one quick fix at a time.