Check first, as a team.

Check first is a habit of pausing at five moments: when you pay, paste, sign, send or share. A team can make it a shared routine by naming those moments, putting them where people work, and treating a question as part of the job.

The short answer. Pause at five moments, when you pay, paste, sign, send or share, and make the pause a shared routine: name the moments, put them where people work, and treat a question as part of the job.

Last reviewed 3 October 2026.

The five moments

• Pay. A payment request, a link or a “free” trial. Before You Pay asks six short questions.
• Paste. Names and numbers going into an artificial intelligence tool. Hide Names from artificial intelligence swaps them for labels first.
• Sign. Sign-ups and subscriptions that keep charging. Subscription Check finds payments that repeat.
• Send. A PDF (Portable Document Format) file leaving your hands. Is It Really Blacked Out? looks for words left under black boxes.
• Share. A Word, Excel or PowerPoint file going to someone else, including one exported from Apple Pages, Numbers or Keynote, or from Google Docs, Sheets or Slides. Release Check looks for hidden sheets, comments, tracked changes and stored names.

Each tool runs on your own phone or computer, so what you check is not uploaded.

Why a routine and not a reminder

Safe habits tend to spread when they are built into the moment of the action. In February 2022 Google reported that accounts it had switched to two-step sign-in by default, more than 150 million of them, saw 50 per cent fewer hijackings. Google gave no raw numbers, so the figure is a guide and not a measurement.

A 2016 study by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology, based on interviews with 40 people, found that a constant stream of security decisions wears people down, and that they then act carelessly or stop trying. It is a small study. Its advice was to reduce the number of decisions and make the right action obvious. Five named moments are a way of doing that.

A routine a team can share

1. Choose the moments that apply. A finance team may use Pay and Sign most, and a communications team Paste, Send and Share.
2. Put the five moments where people work. The Check first poster is free and prints on one A4 page, with a line to write in who to ask.
3. Add it to a meeting you already hold. One item, one example, no test.
4. Name a person to ask. Asking before acting is the routine, and a question needs no explanation.
5. Keep a record where one is needed. A dated note of what was checked and when helps if a payment or a document is questioned later.

What this does and does not cover

Check first adds to the four habits that the 2026 Cybersecurity Awareness Month promotes, which are strong passwords with a password manager, multifactor sign-in, recognising and reporting scams, and software updates. It does not replace them, and UtilForge does not monitor devices or networks.

Sources

• National Cybersecurity Alliance, Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2026
• TechTarget, report on Google’s two-step results (February 2022)
• Dark Reading, report on the National Institute of Standards and Technology security fatigue study (2016)

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