Target Hardening
October 2, 2025
You already know more about security than you think.
You lock your front door. You don’t leave your car running in a parking lot with the keys inside. You don’t hand your wallet to someone on the street just because they asked nicely. These aren’t complicated decisions—they’re habits built on common sense.
But somewhere along the way, we stopped applying that thinking to our digital lives.
At Wigington Intelligence Group, we spend our days doing something called OSINT—Open Source Intelligence. That’s a fancy way of saying we find information that’s publicly available. Businesses hire us to see what their competitors are up to, to verify someone’s background, or to understand what the internet knows about their company.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth we’ve learned: most people have no idea how much of their life is visible to anyone who knows where to look.
This isn’t about hackers in dark rooms. It’s about default settings, forgotten accounts, and the small decisions that add up over time. It’s about the fact that your “free” apps aren’t free—you’re paying with information about yourself, your habits, and your relationships.
When you sign up for a free service—social media, email, that fun quiz about which 90s sitcom character you are—you’re making a trade. You get convenience. They get data.
That data gets analyzed, packaged, and sold. It’s used to predict what you’ll buy, how you’ll vote, what keeps you scrolling. And increasingly, it’s being fed into AI systems that learn from everything you type.
That question you asked ChatGPT about your health symptoms? Your financial situation? Your relationship problems? That’s not a private conversation. It’s training data.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s the business model.
We’re calling this series “Target Hardening.” It’s a term borrowed from physical security—making yourself a harder target for someone who might want what you have. Same concept, different locks.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll cover:
The basics you already understand — You don’t use the same key for your house, your car, and your office. So why are you using the same password everywhere? We’ll talk about the security principles you already apply in the physical world and how to translate them online.
What “hacked” actually means — When your aunt says she got hacked, what really happened? We’ll break down the terminology—phishing, spoofing, social engineering—so you can understand what you’re protecting against.
Your digital footprint — What can someone find out about you in 15 minutes with nothing but Google? You might be surprised. We’ll show you how to look at yourself through a stranger’s eyes.
Settings that matter — Your phone and apps come with default settings designed to benefit the company, not you. We’ll walk through the ones worth changing.
When to worry and when not to — Not every popup is a virus. Not every scam is sophisticated. We’ll help you calibrate your concern so you’re not anxious about everything or oblivious to real risks.
We’re not here to make you afraid of technology or convince you to delete everything and live off the grid. Technology is useful. The internet connects us to people and information in ways that genuinely improve our lives.
The goal is informed decisions. Understanding the trade-offs you’re making. Knowing that when something is free, you’re paying for it some other way.
You wouldn’t leave your front door wide open just because nothing bad has happened yet. You don’t need to be a locksmith to turn a deadbolt.
Let’s apply that same thinking to the rest of your life.
This is the first post in our Target Hardening series. Next up: “What Does ‘Hacked’ Actually Mean?” — breaking down the terminology you hear in the news.