“For Lent, I’m giving up…”

This week marked the beginning of Lent so, being the proactive PR people that we are, we sold in a feature for our clients on the bad cyber security habits they think users should be giving up. This got me thinking; we’re great at giving up stuff for Lent here at éclat (Barry is foregoing potatoes, Kirsten is giving up red meat and I’m trying to give up swearing – more on that in a later blog), but what about our own bad security, or even PR, habits?

Now, working in the industry, we do have some pretty good security habits across the team – just ask Barry aka Mr I’m Just Too Secure Salmon who will tell you all about the benefits of password managers and two-factor authentication. However, below are just a couple I managed to wrangle out of the team. They also wouldn’t let me put names to confessions so you can have a go at guessing who said what!

I’m going to give up re-using my passwords (yes, I know I should have done this before!). Since working at éclat I’ve made sure to create unique 12 character passwords for everything and store them in a password manager, but I’ve only just gotten around to changing all the ones I made before.”

 

“I’m going to cut back on the PR jargon. Less liaising, no more circling back.”

 “Not sure if these are habits to break but things I could do better!

  • Checking my privacy settings across personal accounts are all up to date.
  • Make sure all the apps on my personal phone are up to date.”

“I’m going to limit myself to one acronym per piece of content I write, otherwise it becomes a game of acronym bingo!”

 “I’m terrible for using the same password for everything so I need to stop doing this. I’ve also just been told off by almost everyone in the office for confessing to this!”

“I am going to stop trying to multitask and move on from unfinished jobs.”

 

So there you have it, just a few of the bad habits we’re going to give up during this Lent period. Check back after Easter and I’ll let you know how we did.

 

 

Cyber Beat podcast episode 4 – Interviewing freelance journalist Jane Bird

Journalist Q&A: Davey Winder – Part 1