Map your critical accounts
Identify the accounts and recovery channels whose loss would cause the most damage.
Secure Our World
From Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Watch here or open it on YouTube .
Use CISA's Secure Our World sequence to prioritize simple protective actions, then apply them first to the accounts with the greatest recovery power.What this lesson is really solving.
Inventory accounts by consequence and recovery relationship. Start with primary email, mobile carrier, password manager, identity providers, finance, cloud storage, work, and social accounts. Record the official URL, recovery method, devices, and whether the account can reset others.
Understand the idea before touching the steps.
Security is a dependency map: email and phone often unlock everything else.
Follow these steps in order.
Take the action in each step; then use the deliverable below to prove the lesson is finished.
- 1
List primary email, phone carrier, banking, cloud storage, social, work, tax, and password-manager accounts.
- 2
Mark what each account can reset, what data it holds, and the impact of takeover.
- 3
Prioritize email, password manager, phone carrier, financial accounts, and cloud backups.
- 4
Record official support and recovery URLs in a secure offline location.
See the standard in context.
Sam discovers that an old email address can recover both a current inbox and a payment account. The old inbox has a reused password and no MFA, so it is upgraded or removed before lower-risk entertainment accounts are reviewed.
Inspect before you move on.
- Every account capable of resetting another is marked critical.
- Recovery addresses and phone numbers are current and controlled.
- Unknown sessions, connected apps, and forwarding rules are reviewed.
Your deliverable
A critical-account map ranked by impact and recovery dependency.
Watch for this
Securing social accounts while the email address that resets them remains weak.
Prove it—don’t just recognize it.
You can name the three accounts that function as master keys to your digital life.
Quick knowledge check
Answer from the lesson—not from confidence alone. Score at least 2 of 3 to unlock completion.
This curriculum-aligned check is scored automatically and stored with your account when signed in. It is an objective learning signal, but it has not yet been independently validated as a standardized assessment.
Tools, templates, and references
Pass the knowledge check above first.
Completion unlocks after a score of 2 out of 3. Then confirm that you produced the lesson deliverable.
Go to the knowledge check