(This is a guest post by Chad Warner, Internet safety enthusiast at Defending Digital.)
You shouldn't know any of your passwords! You should leave this to a password manager, like LastPass. Here's how to get that set up.
October is National Cyber-Security Awareness Month. So now would be a great time to get off your butt and implement some of the security tips that I’ve recommended over the years! If you think you’re in pretty good shape, then maybe this would be a good time to help your loved ones get secure. Here
A recent study found that most people aren’t taking the time to properly wipe data off their hard drives before they resell them. The researchers bought 200 used hard drives and found that a whopping 59% of the drives still had data that was accessible, including “employment and payroll records, family and holiday photos (along
Our mobile phone numbers today have become our unique identifiers, even more so than our full names. While you’ve probably run across at least one other person who shares your name, our mobile numbers are guaranteed to be globally unique. And since we can port these numbers to any service, we tend to keep these
[This article is part of a Beginners Week blog series from my publisher, Apress.] While humans have had several millennia to adapt to the dangers of the natural world and many decades to react to the advancements of the modern age, the virtual world of the internet is relatively new. The risks of the physical
A critical vulnerability has been found in older versions of Microsoft Windows. If you’re affected, you need to patch your operating system immediately (see below). If you know anyone with an older PC, you need to make sure they’re aware of this ticking time bomb. But what you really need to do, frankly, is update
I’ve written a comprehensive guide to choosing the best web browser (which you should definitely read), but the choice just keeps getting clearer. If you’re not already using it, you really need to switch to Firefox. Privacy vs Security The main point of my browser guide is that there is a big difference between security
Credit cards and debit cards are so similar that people often feel they are interchangeable. They look the same, swipe the same, and work in almost all the same places. But there is one huge difference between debit cards and credit cards: debit cards directly access your money. Credit cards are loans – they can
A little more than a week ago, we saw perhaps the single largest data breach dump in history. This followed another massive data disclosure from the same group just a couple weeks prior. Dubbed “Collections 1-5”, together these data dumps represent literally billions of unique user email addresses and passwords. While many of the records
What follows is a cautionary tale about a technology I’ve been recommending for years: two-factor authentication, or 2FA. Citizens of the Internet, hear me out! This could happen to you… The Case of the Missing Codes Last month, Apple offered a killer deal on iPhone trade-ins: they doubled the value of your old phone as
