What Constitutes a Security Incident for Individuals

Not every unusual thing is a security incident. But certain situations warrant escalation.

You've shared credentials with someone who may not be who they claimed to be. You've pasted sensitive data into a tool you later realized you shouldn't have. You've received an unsolicited request — via email, message, chat — that turned out to be suspicious, especially if you acted on it. You've received an alert that one of your accounts has been accessed from an unfamiliar location. You've discovered that a tool you used at work exposed organizational data or your personal information.

Any of these warrants escalation. Not because they're certainly significant — sometimes they turn out to be nothing. But because the professional response to "I think something may have happened" is to assess whether it did, and the amateur response is to hope the problem goes away. Hope is not a security strategy.