Cyber security, made simpleStay safe online for the whole family

What "cyber hygiene" means, and why we named the site after it

Cyber hygiene is the set of small, repeated habits that keep you safe online, in the same way that washing your hands keeps you healthy. Neither is dramatic. Neither requires expertise. Both work because they are done routinely rather than perfectly.

This framing matters because most online safety advice fails for the opposite reason: it is presented as a technical subject requiring understanding of encryption, networks and threat models. Most people conclude, reasonably, that it is not for them. But the handful of habits that prevent most real harm are not technical at all, and they can be explained in a paragraph.

The five habits that do most of the work

1. Use a different password on every account. Reuse is the reason one breach at a forum you forgot about costs you your email. A password manager makes this practical; without one, at minimum make your email and banking passwords unique.
2. Turn on two-factor authentication, starting with your email. Your email can reset nearly every other account you own, which makes it the master key. Protect it first.
3. Let everything update automatically. Most successful attacks exploit flaws that were fixed months earlier. This habit costs nothing and runs by itself.
4. Verify through a channel you chose. Hang up and dial the number on your card. Open the bank's app rather than the link. Message your daughter on the number already in your phone. This defeats almost every scam regardless of how convincing it is.
5. Agree a family code word. Voice cloning has made "it sounded like her" meaningless. A word agreed in advance restores the ability to verify.

That is the whole of it. Everything else on this site is detail, explanation, or practice for those five.

Who this site is for

Three groups, and each has its own area.

Children learn through games rather than warnings, because repetition beats lectures and a game gets replayed. The Kids has three games that teach scam recognition as a fast, intuitive skill, along with simple rules written in language a child will actually use.

Adults and older people get plain-English guidance without jargon or scare tactics in the Adults and Seniors guides. The emphasis is on the scams that are actually costing people money right now — impersonation calls, fake invoices, and urgent requests from cloned voices.

Anyone who wants to check something specific can use the tools and the guides to individual scam types.

How the site is funded, and what that means for your data

This site is free and is paid for by advertising. That funding model has a direct consequence for how the tools are built: the tools that take input run in your browser. Passwords, links, email text and quiz answers are processed on your own device, and the tools do not transmit or store what you enter. The one exception is the Password Breach Checker, which sends only the first five characters of a one-way hash of your password, never the password itself. There is no database of what you type into the tools.

You can check this yourself: load a tool, switch off your internet, and it keeps working. The Password Breach Checker is the exception, because it needs the internet to check for a match. Advertising and analytics scripts do run on the site like most of the web, and in the EU, UK and Switzerland the cookies for those are not set until you accept them. The privacy policy sets out the detail.

Where to start if you only have ten minutes

Turn on two-factor authentication for your email account, and agree a family check word with the people closest to you. Those two actions, done today, remove more real risk than anything else on this site. Everything else can wait for a weekend.