Russian cyberwarfare is the new threat to the nation, according to Nick Carter, the head of the British army, which means that the new frontline is, well, you. So it’s now more than just simple self-care to be smart about your online security – it’s your patriotic duty.

Update your devices – and upgrade the ones you can’t

Some of the most damaging cyber-attacks in recent years haven’t come through elite hackers crafting one-of-a-kind viruses to break into secure government devices, but from exploiting the old and out-of-date hardware that normal people use every day.

Take the Mirai botnet: a swarm of millions of hacked devices, it was used to overload servers by bombarding them with traffic requests. But the basic elements of the botnet were simple, cheap, “internet of things” devices such as security cameras or smart lightbulbs, which had glaring security flaws that no one ever bothered to fix.

Don’t be a John Podesta

“Fancy Bear” is the organisation behind the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. He fell prey to a phishing campaign, well-executed but simple, that allowed the attackers to download – and leak – every email he had sent or received.

At its heart, the hack used a fake warning from Google, asking Podesta to click a link and log in to respond to a security alert. After an aide mistakenly told him the link looked legitimate (he meant to type “illegitimate”), he did – but the link didn’t go to Google, and so he ended up sharing his username and password with the attackers.

The easy-to-say, hard-to-do advice is “always make sure links are from who they say they are”. A more useful recommendation may be to join the 10% who have “two-factor authentication” turned on their email.

Avoid paying the ransom

The WannaCry ransomware attack has been credibly linked to North Korea, which has apparently been stepping up its use of cybercrime as a method of fundraising – a technological improvement from recent history, when the nation was one of the largest forgers of US currency.

Keeping a backup of your critical data is a good idea anyway (who knows when a stray cup of coffee will fry your treasured photos?), but it is twice as useful if you can avoid paying a bitcoin ransom to a pariah state.

Think twice before retweeting and sharing

According to new figures from Twitter, more than 50,000 accounts on the site were created for the express purpose of spreading Russian misinformation during the US election. Of course, the point of the misinformation accounts was to blend in with conventional US political activists, so … maybe just log off altogether?