Chances are, you wouldn’t give someone your Social Security number or address to a stranger who asked for it on the street. Likewise, you shouldn’t hand it over to someone who calls purporting to be a tech support specialist (a common scam) or in an email saying you’ve won a prize and need to fill in […]

A digital signature—a type of electronic signature—is a mathematical algorithm routinely used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message (e.g., an email, a credit card transaction, or a digital document). Digital signatures generate a virtual fingerprint that is unique to a person or entity and are used to identify users and protect information […]

Lots of phishing scams include the phisher posing as a major retailer and then sending emails claiming to contain coupons that you redeem by clicking them in an email. To stay safe, never click on one of these offers if it seems to good to be true, comes from a long/garbled email address, or is contained in […]

Modern email spam filters are very powerful and can keep many common threats controlled without them ever hitting your inbox. Still, it’s worthwhile to occasionally take a look at your spam folder to see if the filter is too aggressive and is blocking mail you want to see. Marking items as spam or not spam […]

Here are some tip-offs that can alert you to a phishing email: misspellings, grammatical mistakes, including your email address in the subject line, no acknowledgement of your name, requests to verify your account, warnings that your account has been compromised. Spotting these can reduce the risk of being a phishing email victim. Total Defense is […]

Your email account is one of the most important sources of personal information there are. If someone were to break into it, your confidential data could be decisively compromised. You should have a minimum of two email accounts, with one being a secure backup in case one email account is compromised and you need to […]