Digital Security Basics for Remote Workers

Two-factor authentication on every account that offers it is the single highest-leverage security habit available, and it's free. Prioritize your email, banking, and any account tied to client work first — email specifically, because it's usually the password-reset gateway to everything else.

A password manager matters more for nomads than for most people, because reusing passwords across accounts becomes a bigger liability when you're regularly connecting from new networks and new devices. Generate unique passwords per account rather than trying to remember variations of the same one.

Public and hotel Wi-Fi networks are the actual risk, not some abstract hacker — assume anything unencrypted on a shared network can be seen by someone else on that network. This is the practical case for a VPN specifically on shared networks, separate from any privacy or streaming use case.

Back up client work and critical files somewhere that isn't just your laptop. A stolen or damaged laptop is a much bigger problem for a nomad without easy access to backup hardware than it is for someone who can walk to an office IT department — cloud backup, set to run automatically, removes this as something you have to remember to do.