Digital hygiene of public servants as an important component of national security

The article is devoted to determining the basic rules of digital hygiene for public servants in order to support national security. To achieve the set goal, the following scientific tasks were defined: to determine a list of basic rules of digital hygiene for public servants, namely – to reveal the issues of password reliability on accounts, information leaks on third-party sites, the specifics of phishing, the features of connection protocols, to reveal the mechanism of cookie files, to analyze the practice of viruses and antiviruses. In the study, the digital hygiene of a public servant is divided into conditional blocks: safe use of mail (password management, recognition of phishing attacks), competent behavior on third-party sites (paying attention to the site connection protocol, considering cookie files, checking the site for viruses). As examples of phishing attacks, the study cites the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak and the attack on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman John Podesta by forging an email to his email address asking him to change his password. As an example of a third-party information leak, the Facebook Marketplace incident in 2024 is cited. The database leak contained a wide range of personal information, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook IDs, and Facebook profile information. Attackers can use email addresses leaked to the Internet in phishing attacks and mobile phishing attacks on Facebook Marketplace user numbers. An example of the use of a virus for geopolitical purposes is SUNBURST. SUNBURST was a supply chain attack that used a backdoor implanted in a supplier to attack and indirectly compromise organizations around the world. Orion, the SolarWinds software that was compromised by criminals, was used by about 33,000 government and private customers. Summing up the study, it should be noted that, first of all, an employee of a public authority should distinguish between their personal and corporate mail located in the institution's ecosystem. Registering on different sites from corporate mail is potentially dangerous for the integrity of the system, because any site with a significant number of users can be hacked for commercial sale of an array of information. It is important to understand that national security is a complex system, and, as is known, the integrity of the system is determined by the integrity of the weakest element, in the framework of the study – a careless public employee.