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 […]

A common tactic for bad actors to scam people into giving up valuable personal information is to pose as a police officer when contacting a potential victim. However, just because someone says they’re a law enforcement officer doesn’t mean they are. This goes for all forms of remote communication, including phone calls: If someone claiming […]

Most people understand by now that there’s no such thing as absolute privacy online, and even private browsers can’t control what your ISP can see. Don’t look for information on how to do anything illegal or dangerous, and don’t search for any sites or content that are against the law.

This goes for pretty much all information online, but bogus statistics are rampant all over the internet. If you’re writing a paper, article or anything else that cites statistics, try to get them directly from a reputable research study — if a site doesn’t say where it got its numbers, they may not be reliable.

When visiting a website for the first time – perhaps via an email link – lookout for the telling signs of phishing. These may involve misspellings and grammatical mistakes on the page, aggressive advertising and particularly unusual and complex URLs. If you see some or all of them, leave the website straightaway.