Let’s face it, even if you’re still spending most of your day working from home, we’ve all got a lot more free time than we know what to do with lately.

But if you ask us, there’s no better opportunity than right now to stop and consider your digital identity, and think about how and why you should be protecting it, because while most of the world is on lockdown, hackers and cybercriminals are still open for business.

Here are 5 things you can do while self-isolating that will not only entertain you and help kill some time, but might just teach you a thing or two about cybersecurity and privacy.



1- Watch “The Great Hack”

Produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, Netflix's "The Great Hack" examines the infamous 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was revealed that Facebook allowed a British political consulting firm to harvest the private data of millions of Facebook users without their consent.

The documentary follows the stories of Professor David Carroll, who filed a legal claim against the company demanding a copy of his data, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who exposed the scandal, and the firm’s former business development director Brittany Kaiser.



2- Read “Sandworm” by Andy Greenberg

"Sandworm is much more than a true-life techno-thriller. It's a tour through a realm that is both invisible and critical to the daily lives of every person alive in the 21st century.” That’s how the Los Angeles Times described this book by WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg.

In the book, Greenberg breaks down the inside story of NotPetya, the most devastating cyberattack in history that caused over $10 billion in real world damages in June, 2017. Greenberg travels across the globe, speaking with the researchers who were on the frontlines of the attack, in an effort to track down the group of hackers responsible for it: Sandworm.



3- Listen to the "Darknet Diaries” podcast

The tagline for the "Darknet Diaries” podcast is “True stories from the dark side of the internet”. In each episode, host Jack Rhysider tells chilling real life stories of suspense and cybercrime, often speaking directly to the people involved.

From the penetration tester who accidentally robbed the wrong bank to the 14 year old hacker who found himself working with the FBI, every episode gives a small peek at a shadowy corner of the online world most of us are unaware of.



4- Play "Watch Dogs 2”

This 2016 video game is more fiction than fact, but features a lot of themes that should be taken very seriously. In the game developed and published by Ubisoft, the entire city of San Francisco is connected through one computer network called ctOS. You play as a “hacktivist” on a mission to uncover the corruption of the company behind ctOS.

Being a hacker, the gameplay relies on exploiting this system's vulnerabilities, hacking into everything from security cameras to cars and more. The game highlights some important real-world issues such as surveillance, data collection, and election fraud, and draws inspiration from a lot of actual hacking.



We’ve listed some fun stuff to watch, read, play, and listen to, but let’s not let their warnings and valuable lessons go to waste. Every bad password you set for an online account is like a crack in your front door, and the best way to seal those cracks and fortify that door is to replace each of those passwords with a strong and unique one.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1- Download the MYKI Password Manager & Authenticator mobile app and import your account credentials

2- Head to the Security Dashboard section, where any of your weak or reused passwords will be identified and highlighted

3- Take your time going to each account, resetting its password, and replacing it with a stronger more complex one, which you can generate with MYKI’s built-in Password Generator

And that is time well spent.

Download MYKI for mobile or desktop and start taking control of your digital identity.