Most cyber incidents in Indian families are stopped — or significantly reduced — by five small habits. We've watched the same five protect households across our workshop work. None of them are technically difficult. All of them are usually missing in the homes that get attacked. Run through the list with your family this weekend.
1. Two-factor authentication on email, WhatsApp, and banking apps. Email is the master key — if your Gmail or Outlook account is compromised, every other account that uses it for password recovery follows. Turn on 2FA today, prefer an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator) over SMS. SMS 2FA is better than nothing, but SIM-swap attacks in India bypass it every week.
2. Unique passwords stored in a trusted password manager. The 'one strong password I use everywhere' habit is the single biggest source of account-takeover incidents we see. The fix is a password manager (Bitwarden free, 1Password, or Apple/Google's built-in ones for non-technical family members). Generate, never remember.
3. Quarterly privacy review of every social-media account. Once every three months, sit with each family member and walk through Instagram / Facebook / X / LinkedIn privacy settings together. Who can DM you? Who can tag you? Is your friends list public? Is your phone number searchable? Defaults change without notice — review on a schedule.
4. Pre-agreed family rules for sharing OTPs, IDs, and screen-share access. The single most effective rule we recommend: '*nobody* in this household ever reads out an OTP to a phone caller, ever, for any reason.' Banks, electricity boards, Aadhaar, none of them will ever ask. The rule has to be *absolute* — if there's an exception, scammers find it. Same with screen-share apps: zero use of AnyDesk, TeamViewer, Quick Assist with anyone outside the immediate family.
5. A pre-agreed response plan if something does go wrong. Who in the family is the first call? Where is the list of bank emergency numbers? Where are the IDs and account recovery codes stored? Most families realise during an incident that nobody knows any of this — which loses the golden first hour. Print a one-page sheet, stick it on the fridge. It is genuinely the cheapest cyber-security investment your family will ever make.
Score your household out of 5. Under 4 honest yeses — book a PGL Cyber Safety workshop. We run them online, offline, and hybrid for families, schools, corporates, and communities, and the most common feedback we get is 'we should have done this years ago'. The workshop page has more detail.
