SEC-04: Digital Security
Harden the devices, accounts and channels your group actually depends on — and write a standard that holds when members join, lose a handset or leave.
Course Overview, One Page
A single printable page covering what SEC-04 teaches, the 7 lessons, what you need before starting, and the related FFTP courses. Useful for deciding whether the course is for you, or for handing to somebody in your group who is weighing it up.
Why This Course
SEC-02 taught you to identify what must not get out. This course is the digital half of protecting it. It assumes no technical background, every measure it asks for is available on an ordinary phone at no cost, and it ends with you auditing your own group rather than reading about somebody else’s.
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:
- Harden a phone, laptop and home network to a stated minimum, and say what that hardening does not protect against.
- Choose the right channel for a given message, and explain what end-to-end encryption does and does not promise.
- Build an account register for your group — every shared login with a named owner, a deputy and a recovery path that survives their departure.
- Run a footprint audit from the outside in, and recognize how separately harmless items combine into your group’s pattern of life.
- Write a two-page group digital security standard with joining, lost-device and departure routines, then audit your group against it.
Lessons 01–07
What the phone in your pocket records without being asked, the realistic ways that record leaves your control, and the hardening checklist every member should work through this week.
Why metadata frequently gives away more than content, what end-to-end encryption actually covers, and how to build a channel plan instead of arguing about apps.
How accounts are really lost, the two measures that stop most of it, and the shared-login problem that no password manager solves on its own.
What your group has already published about itself, how harmless pieces aggregate into a revealing picture, and a six-step audit you run from a stranger’s point of view.
What a network operator can still see, when a VPN earns its place and when it is a step backwards, and why the screen is the real exposure in a public space.
The five sections a working standard needs, requirements written so they can be checked, and the joining, lost-device and departure routines groups always leave out.
Score your own group across all five areas on evidence rather than assertion, and leave with a dated remediation plan that names a person against every gap.
How This Course Works
| Format | Seven self-paced online lessons, each with four knowledge checks to answer correctly before the next lesson unlocks. |
| Prerequisites | SEC-02 Know What You’re Showing (OPSEC Baseline) is recommended, not required. SEC-04 protects the critical information SEC-02 teaches you to identify, and the two read well together in that order. |
| Technical level | None assumed. Every measure the course asks for is available on an ordinary phone or laptop at no cost, and nothing here needs a specialist to set up. |
| Time | Roughly 30–40 minutes per lesson. The capstone runs longer, because it is a group exercise rather than a reading one. |
| What you’ll produce | A hardened device, an account register, a dated footprint audit, a two-page group standard, and a completed audit with a remediation plan. |
| Related courses | SEC-06 (Applied OPSEC) covers your individual digital signature in depth; COM-04 covers emission control on the air. Both complement this course rather than overlapping it. |
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