Crypto Party for the Holidays

 

This year for the holidays, have a Crypto Party. Join your friends and family on-line or in person and improve your group cyber-security. Protect your computers against attack and secure your communications against eavesdropping.

Install HTTPS Everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere in your browser. This causes your browser to make a secure (https) connection to web-sites. And, install Privacy Badger https://privacybadger.org/ to stop advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.

Encryption helps to protect you from hackers, cyber-criminals, and government surveillance, but it is only really effective if everyone with whom you communicate is also using encryption. Help protect yourself, your friends, and your family by having a Crypto Party this year for the holidays. This year get everyone to transition to an encrypted e-mail service, such as ProtonMail https://protonmail.com/ and a secure messenger such as Signal https://www.signal.org/. Now whenever you communicate with your friends and family, use ProtonMail or Signal.

Everyone should also download a password manager, such as KeePass https://keepass.info/ or Password Safe https://www.pwsafe.org/ and update all of their on-line passwords.

These five simple steps will help everyone protect themselves on-line, and communicate a bit more securely with each other. 

1.   HTTPS Everywhere

2.    Privacy Badger

3.    ProtonMail

4.    Signal Messenger

5.    and a Password Manager...
 

Of course there are many other things that you can do to enhance your personal cyber-security, such as using VeraCrypt https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html for full-disk encryption or to create secure containers to store sensitive files. The TOR Browser https://www.torproject.org/ and the TAILS OS https://tails.boum.org/ provide greater privacy and anonymity on-line. Perhaps everyone will want to set up PGP/GNUPG https://gnupg.org/ or use a more basic program like Mailvelope https://www.mailvelope.com/en/ to use PGP within their browsers. 

For your holiday Crypto Party this year take the five simple steps suggested above, and expand into other things as your group sees fit. 

Be a little bit safer in the coming year!