Unfortunately, many of us who become victim to any sort of information security breach won’t know until someone else tells us. For example, we might get a message or call from a friend asking why we sent that “spammy” email with a link to a free Amazon gift card. Have we been hacked? Spoofed? And
As we learned from the Equifax breach in 2017, we can fall victim to identity theft through no fault of our own. Although it isn’t feasible to master every identity theft scenario, it’s worth your time to learn more about the available identity theft tools and services and how to initiate a recovery plan if you become
A major risk to both businesses and individuals, social engineering involves the exploitation of our very nature. Specifically, criminals use social engineering techniques to elicit feelings of fear, uncertainty, pressure, and excitement in the hope that we will deviate from the ways we typically behave. Their goal is to gain access to our sensitive information
It’s tough to remember how we managed our daily lives without smartphones. How did we get around town without quick access to Google Maps? Pay our bills on time before we had credit card and banking apps? Or let someone know we were running late without text messaging? Because completing tasks on smartphones is so
When it comes to filing your tax return, you put in the time and effort to complete every form accurately and according to the instructions. But even if you do everything by the book, a tax identity thief may still file a fraudulent return in your name. Unfortunately, this happens all too often. In fact,
Have you ever used Dropbox or Box.com? How about web-based mail, like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Hotmail? If you consider that all of these are clouds—as are most Google apps—it’s hard to find an Internet user who doesn’t have some information in the cloud. As cloud-based services become more prevalent, you might be wondering: Is the cloud
If you’ve checked the news in the past month, you’ve likely heard of the WannaCry ransomware attack, one of the most widespread cyber attacks to date. Security experts estimate that more than 200,000 users have been infected with this malware. Once infected, all information on the user’s computer is encrypted (i.e., locked away) unless a ransom
Did you know that phishing (i.e., scam) e-mails account for about 91 percent of all cyberattacks? In other words, nearly every cybersecurity issue you could think of—from viruses, to ransomware, to full-blown data breaches—starts with users accidentally clicking malicious links in e-mails. On the technology end, spam filters and antivirus scanners combat the threat of phishing e-mails.
Imagine this: You open an e-mail that seems to come from Google, prompting you to click a link to reset your password. But when you click, a mysterious .exe file downloads and launches. Slowly, all the files on your desktop turn into white paper icons, and the names of all your files turn into scrambled
Computer forensic experts are a lot like paleontologists—the scientists who study the life of past geological periods. Paleontologists have never unearthed a full dinosaur skeleton. But, by examining just a small sample of scattered bones, they’ve been able to figure out the skeletal structure of hundreds of dinosaur species. Likewise, when we delete our computer
