Use these supporting resources when a question needs more detail. Start with Start Here: Use AI Safely, the Easy Way if you are new to artificial intelligence (AI).
Check and prepare
- Personal AI Security Checklist: Forty checks across Own IT, Secure IT, Protect IT, and Monitor IT. Record decisions and open items without treating a checked box as proof of safety.
- Personal AI Security Checkup Prompt: A guided review matched to the 40 checklist IDs, plus a private inventory template and quarterly review.
- AI Risk Matrix: Choose How Much Access a Task Needs: Compare information sensitivity, the cost of a wrong response, and the access your AI setup would receive.
- Short-Lived AI Access Checklist: Checks before, during, and after a temporary connection, including scope, supervision, source-side revocation, and remaining copies.
Use AI for a task
- Safer AI Recipes: Five worked approaches to subscriptions, email threads, grocery spending, family schedules, and preparing questions for a clinician.
- Everyday AI Prompts: Start With the Task: Use a guided planner and practical request patterns to define a task, minimize inputs, check responses, and keep the final action with a person.
- Plan an AI Task From Start to Finish: Twenty-seven planning checkpoints covering the task, settings, minimized inputs, access decisions, checking, cleanup, and ongoing review.
- AI Chat Handoff Prompt: Create a short summary you review before continuing a long or drifting task in a fresh chat.
Understand data and access
- Personal and Business AI Accounts: Check the Agreement and the Data Route: Understand the different roles of a DPA and a BAA, and why coverage depends on the account, feature, configuration, and data route.
- Health Information and AI: Share Less and Understand the Boundary: Health details can reach AI through records, email, calendars, and receipts. Understand the privacy boundary and keep medical decisions with your clinician.
- What AI Attack Research Teaches Us About Access: Understand the different outcomes in reported lab tests and the practical lessons for permissions, output rendering, supervision, and technical controls.
For organizations
- The Missing Warning Label: Governing AI Access to Mail and Data: A professional guide to least privilege, untrusted content, output handling, egress, shadow AI, testing, and release decisions.
- How the AI Security Checkup Relates to Security Standards: An interpretive map to NIST and OWASP themes, with clear boundaries between personal habits, organizational controls, standards, and legal duties.
Build the foundation
- Own IT, Secure IT, Protect IT, Monitor IT: Cybersecurity Basics: Practical habits for accounts, devices, scams, backups, family verification, and regular security checks.
- Family Online Safety Guide and Cybersecurity Basics Checkup: A simple family guide and a practical checklist for passwords, scams, backups, and what to do when something goes wrong.
Keep the limits clear
The four pillars support a repeatable habit. A completed checkup does not prove that an account, application, or organization is safe or compliant. Work and regulated information must follow the applicable policies, agreements, and controls.
The author develops commercial security tools in this area. These resources are tool-neutral and recommend no product. Product names, when used, are examples rather than endorsements. Own IT, Secure IT, and Protect IT draw on the 2019 Cybersecurity Awareness Month theme; Monitor IT extends the cycle into a repeatable personal habit. General educational information, not a scan, compliance assessment, or guarantee of safety. CC BY 4.0.