7MS #436: Cleaning Up Your Cloud Clutter

7 Minute Security

Hey, hope you're having a great week! The last few weeks have had somewhat of a homecoming and home cleaning theme. To continue that train of thought, over the last few days I've gotten heavy into cleaning up my cloud clutter - cloud services, email, file sharing, etc. - in an effort to be more secure and have a reduced digital footprint. Today's tips include:

• Double-check that any device you have that supports full-disk encryption has it enabled

• On all your machines, clean up old straggler artifacts in C:, desktop folder, downloads folder, etc. Use the nifty built in tools for Windows 10 to free up even more disk space (I just learned about this one recently - Windirstat and Treesizefree were my go-tos for years)

• Got old PCs sitting around you're not using? Nuke 'em with DBAN.

• Go into your password vault and clean out creds for services you don't use anymore (especially for old client projects!)

• Purge your file share services (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. on a regular basis), and/or bring older archives over to cold (on-site) encrypted storage

• Review your "bottleneck" accounts (key email accounts, for example) and review the devices/services linked to them - clean up and purge regularly

• Handling password hashes? Here's one way to setup an encrypted partition for them

• You can clean old email from Gmail quickly using some simple searches. You can also use Google Takeout to download offline copies of mail and then browse them later with Thunderbird