To secure anything, you must know what it is that you’re securing. Securing an environment is difficult to do, if not impossible, to do if you do not know what is in that environment.

To secure yourself you must have a good understanding of what assets you have - both those that are in digital and physical forms. Those assets may or may not be in one location. In fact, some of them may be in locations that you cannot physically access. For example, you can have data stored in a cloud storage service like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Inventorying such assets is usually pretty simple for individuals…

1. Make a written list of all devices that you attach to your network - (You can obtain this by logging into your router and looking at the “Connected Devices” section).
2. Add to the list - in a different section- all storage devices that you use - (hard drives, flash drives, and memory cards).
3. Write or print the list, forgetting even a single device can lead to giant consequences

Understanding Endpoints

An endpoint is any computer enabled device that communicates with a network to which it is connected. Your laptop is an endpoint when it is connected to your home network; similarly -your smartphone is an endpoint both when it is connected via WI-FI to a network and when it is connected by a cellular connection to the network of a cellular provider.

All endpoints possess risk and must, therefore, be secured.

Continue to the following page to discover methods for protecting the devices within your network.