About This Site

Harder to Hack is a passion project turned public service initiative aimed at enhancing personal cybersecurity for everyone.

It’s about empowering each individual with the knowledge and tools necessary to safeguard their digital footprint, one step at a time. Each action you take makes your online accounts, devices, and the data they store that much safer.

I wish it could! But no, unfortunately not.

While you can’t become unhackable, you can take steps to become harder to hack. So, I walk you through a series of sensible actions that can make it harder to break into your systems and accounts, protecting you from different kinds of attacks.

There's always a way in to every connected system. But the idea with the goals I present is to reduce your exposure to some “low-hanging fruit” attacks used by bad actors. I help you build a foundation and start adding layers of protection. As you increase your layers, you can make it so that bad actors have to try harder and spend more time on attacking you. For some attackers, that could be a deterrent.

I hope for this site to be useful for anyone with a laptop, desktop, mobile device, email account, or any other online account that they'd like to improve the security of. And of course with the time and space to work through the guide.

You will need some familiarity with using your computer or device and how to get around. But I hope that most beginners can start at the beginning of the guide and work their way through. Some folks with more experience may have already completed the earlier steps and just find the later steps useful.

Completing the goals on this site can't provide absolute protection (see above) and they may not be as helpful if you're a target of certain types of bad actors.

If you're a journalist, activist, in an abusive domestic environment, or think you may be the target of a sophisticated attacker, you will likely need additional resources to protect yourself online. The EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation both offer guides that may be able to help you further.

I recommend starting with Goal 1: Improve Your Email Account Security. On this page, you'll be presented with two steps to help you achieve this goal. You can visit and complete each step before moving on to the next goal.

From there, work your way through each of the four remaining goals in order until you've completed all of them. Beyond that, I offer the Continue the Journey section, where you can learn about additional steps to take in the ever-evolving world of digital security.

Alternatively, you could take a look at the home page or the outline view to see if there's a particular area you'd like to work on the most.

This site is absolutely free for you to use. You can read through the entire guide and apply any actions that help you, all without spending any money.

I do make recommendations throughout this site for tools made by other companies. On some steps, you will need those tools to complete the goal as presented. Most of those tools have a free version, but some of those tools are paid (to those other companies). I try to offer options for both paid and free tools when possible.

I also offer paid consultation, assessment, and training services, but this isn't necessary to complete the steps presented on the site. These services are intended for folks who would like to go deeper on any topic, would like help expanding these steps to their business, or would just like some coaching to work through these steps one-on-one.