Early 2019 marks the fifteenth anniversary of Facebook’s launch. Since the winter of 2004, social media has come a long way, becoming deeply ingrained in the live of billions of people worldwide. According to the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of Americans used YouTube in 2018 and 68 percent were on Facebook. Even smaller network […]

Visiting a website for the first time, perhaps via an email link? Look for the tell-tale signs of phishing. These include misspellings and grammatical mistakes on the page, aggressive advertising and especially unusual and complex URLs. If you see some or all of them, leave the page immediately.

Many phishing scams involve 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 a […]

URL typos aren’t always harmless – the slightly misspelled website might actually be a registered domain that could put your device in harm’s way. The risk has grown as the number of top-level domains has increased; instead of just .com or .org, now there’s also .xyz, .capital and many more. Double-check any URL you type […]

Vanity link shorteners such as bit.ly and goo.gl were once popular as a space-saving techniques on platforms like Twitter. They carry risks, though, since you cannot immediately see where they lead. Truncated URLs have been used in several scams. For example, a goo.gl address was central to a phishing campaign that pointed victims to a […]

Did you make a New Year’s resolution or 2019? While many people set ambitious goals each January – from losing weight to reading more books – most don’t even come close to reaching them. According to U.S. News, 80 percent of people have abandoned their resolutions by the second week of February. The reasons for […]