5.6: The Personal Security Checklist

The Personal Security Checklist

Five modules, compressed onto one page you can print. The checklist lives on its own page styled for printing — print it, save it as a PDF, or keep it bookmarked. Site navigation disappears in print, so what comes out of the printer is just the list.

How it’s organized

The Done-Once List. Everything from this course that you set up a single time: the manager, 2FA and passkeys on the high-value accounts, tested backups, the router pass, disk encryption, breach alerts, the freezes and PINs. Each line cites its lesson, so if a checkbox puzzles you a year from now, the explanation is one click away. If you’ve been doing the work as you read, most of this list is already checked. The printed copy is your proof, and the unchecked lines are your short to-do list.

The Quarterly 15 Minutes. The maintenance loop: the manager’s health report, updates that don’t auto-apply (the router especially), a recovery-code spot check, the grants-and-sessions glance from 5.5, and one backup restore. Fifteen minutes, four times a year, with your calendar’s help. That’s the entire ongoing cost of everything this course built. Put the recurring reminder in your calendar now, while the tab is open.

The Second Tier. The smaller items that earned one line each along the way: the SIM PIN, app permissions, lock-screen previews, the end-of-life check on your gadgets, a legacy contact on your platform accounts (so the emergency-kit logic from 2.3 extends past you), and one modern habit worth stating plainly: don’t paste passwords, financial details, or sensitive documents into AI chatbots, whose logs are someone else’s database.

Why paper

The printed page isn’t a gimmick; it’s the point. Security maintenance dies of invisibility. The vault, the alerts, and the freezes all work silently, and silent systems drift off the mental map. A checklist on the refrigerator or pinned above the desk is the one part of the system that takes up physical space, and its unchecked boxes nag in a way no app manages. Hang it somewhere you can’t avoid it.

One page, and everything the course built survives contact with ordinary life. All that’s left is proving it stuck: the final assessment is twelve scenarios drawn from everything since “nobody picked you.”