While online data theft has gotten the lion’s share of the attention lately, snail mail information theft has had a recent resurgence. Thieves can find all sorts of interesting information in your utility and medical bills, insurance and financial statements, and credit offers. All the bad guys need is enough information to convince someone else

[Updated: Nov 30, 2019.] The holiday shopping season is once again upon us! And that means it’s time to update my annual gift guide. Unlike other guides, I’m not here to tell you about the hottest Black Friday deals or how to get free overnight shipping on Dec 23rd. My naughty and nice list is

(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.

I’ve been a faithful Dropbox customer for many, many years. Their service solved a very real problem for me: sharing files between multiple computers. As a software engineer (and just a generally geeky person) I have several computers. I have three at home (not including my file server or several Raspberry Pi project boxes) and

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

[UPDATE: This is currently free while in beta, but in the future may not be.] This will be a simple one: Mozilla (maker of Firefox) is trialing a new, free VPN for its browser and you should use it. It’s called Firefox Private Network. It’s a free plugin for Firefox (which is the browser you

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

When we surf the web, there are several ways that our activity can be tracked. But one spy we often overlook is our internet service providers. Not just our home internet provider, but also our cellular service provider. HTTPS Everywhere Thankfully, in recent years, HTTPS has been much more widely adopted on the internet. That

Marketing firms love to tell us that we control our privacy – you simply need to opt out of tracking! Like Dorothy, we’ve had the power all along. Just click your heels three times and uncheck all those pesky tracking options under Settings… somewhere. Just call customer service and speak to a representative. Just mail