Category: Data Privacy

Among the most common types of scams that people can fall victim to is through email. Whether it be someone with an individual email account that they hardly ever check all the way up to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, everybody is vulnerable to scam attempts via email. In fact, more than 80 percent of companies and millions of individuals are subject to a phishing attack each year.

Estimates say that about one percent of all emails sent are from scammers looking to collect your contact information, banking numbers, social security number, and more. It’s scary to think that you are prone to about one attack per day, especially when you consider that only three percent of people are able to identify a phishing attempt each time that one pops up. Around one-third of these scam emails are opened, with many of these installing malware into your computer.

So how do you avoid email scam attempts and verify that those messages that are in your inbox instead of your junk bin are valid? We have some tips on how to make sure you’re using your computer and email services with optimal safety in mind.

Open the Email, Not the Attachments

There are some misconceptions about email scams. One of the more popular ones is that opening the email itself will unleash malware on your computer. This isn’t true, however, as reading the text from the email won’t do anything nefarious. It’s not until the attachments in a scam email are opened that you have to worry. 

There is one drawback to opening the email, though. The message can send out a read receipt to the sender, making you prone to receiving more of these scam email attempts. If you know what to look out for, it can be annoying, but won’t harm your computer.

Always Look at the Sender’s Address

Emails can look extremely legitimate, but there will be one thing that’s off, and it’s the domain address from the sender. A lot of times, people will skip over the address as it will say it’s just from a sender like “Amazon Customer Service” or “Paypal Support” in your inbox. It’s not until you open the email that you’ll see that it’s not from an address that ends in @amazon.com or @paypal.com. The most obvious fake email addresses are the ones that use a random scramble of letters and numbers.

Do Not Click Any Links

If an email looks even the slightest bit suspicious, it’s important to not click any of the links in that message until you know where they go. For example, if you get an email from Paypal that you believe to be a scam, hover your mouse over the links. A small window will pop up with the URL address. If it doesn’t lead directly to paypal.com, then it’s guaranteed to be a scam URL.

Proofreading

Large companies pay copywriters a lot of money to make sure that every email that gets sent out has perfect grammar and punctuation, and these mass emails go through multiple editors to double and triple check. Because of this, it’s almost guaranteed that there won’t be a single grammatical error in an official email. 

Quite often, spam emails will come from out of the country, and English may not be the first language of the scammer. Always look for poor grammar and spelling, which is often very obvious.

Install the Right Software

Thankfully, new software is frequently developed to combat scammers. Make sure that your antivirus and antimalware programs are up to date, and install a personal firewall if you have to. Another added layer of security is to use separate emails, with one sparingly for only important items like banking while other accounts for personal use.

Big data and analytics are here. In fact, they govern the world, and ignoring that is no longer an option.

In order to keep up with the huge piles of data that you can find in every industry and profession, we all need powerful and reliable tools. More often than not, those tools are found in the realm of data visualization.

If you are going to work closely with data visualization resources, then you will want to remember the fundamentals. They can help you avoid many common mistakes and extract as much value as possible from your efforts.

Data Cognition and Perception

The fundamental purpose of data visualization is to make it easy to understand abstract data at a glance. There are countless tools available, all built on the principles of cognition and perception. Can people understand the representation, and is it leading to meaningful conclusions?

To master cognition and perception, any visualization can be analyzed by asking a few key questions:

• Is a clear relationship on display?
• Is the data representation accurate?
• Can you easily compare quantities?
• Is it obvious how the information can and should be used?

If your visualization scores an easy “yes” to each of these questions, then it is successful in terms of cognition and perception.

Design Evaluation

The next fundamental utilizes an evaluation to ensure that the visualization is accomplishing its goals while remaining an accurate and reliable display of information. With so many visual representations available, it’s difficult to distill evaluations into a single checklist, but a general set of criteria can help you build a more specific evaluation for your project: 

• Scale: Inconsistent scaling on a graph can distort the data representation.
• Accuracy: Always triple-check that the data is accurate in the final visual.
• Convention: Follow visual conventions to avoid confusion.
• Cherry picking: Never exclude data to alter the conclusions.
• Bias: Look for signs of bias, whether intentional or not.

Depending on the visual representations, you may also need to evaluate how easy it is to read the presented information and whether or not the visualization is leading to reasonable conclusions (as the saying goes, correlation does not equal causation).

User-Centered Design

The third fundamental that we are exploring is one of the most popular philosophical orientations for data visualization.

The concept is simple. How does the end user interact with the information represented?

As an example, a visualization of user statistics for a smartphone app might be used to help developers make decisions about the next set of updates. If you’re preparing this visualization, then it’s important to remember that the developers are not the ones who ultimately use this information. The data is informing development for the sake of the end user, and data representations should remember that.

Explanation vs Exploration

When dealing with data, there are two different things that happen. During analysis, you explore data to see what it can tell you. When you present the data, you explain the findings to others.

Visualization is involved in both of these aspects. When exploring data, you can use whatever representation tools make sense to you until you find something worth sharing. For explanation, visualizations have less freedom, as they need to present clear information to your audience.

It’s easy to get stuck on explanation and forget about exploration. Manage your time and explore the data as deeply as you can before honing in on the best solutions for explanation.

Communication

The fundamentals so far provide ways to approach visualization and enhance its value. The final pillar looks at data visualization from the other direction. There are two purposes to data visualization: making sense of the data and communicating.

When focusing on communication you need only remember two things. Make clear points, and aim for your audience. With a large data set, it’s easy to draw many conclusions, but when you present information (especially to non-experts), it’s essential that you distill everything into simple and clear points.

Catering to your audience is also vital. When one nuclear physicist presents findings to a room full of other nuclear physicists, the visualizations will look very different than if they are presenting that information to a board of investors (who presumably pay for the research). Always rethink the visualization from the perspective of your audience. It’s a simple but essential step in the process.

Yes, you can install a VPN directly on your router. Before you do, however, you should understand what router VPN does and does not do. You should also be aware that the installation can be either simple or difficult, depending on which specific VPN and router you have.

Why a VPN

A virtual private network, or VPN, creates an encrypted channel between your internet device and a server that belongs to the company you bought your VPN from. Your traffic to the internet appears to come from that server instead of your own device. This creates some privacy advantages. Anyone who intercepts traffic from your laptop or phone will see an unreadable encrypted stream. Your ISP can’t pry into what you’re doing. When your transmission hits the internet, no one can tell it came from you.

Why a Router VPN

To get this protection without router VPN, you have to install VPN on every device you use, from your tablets to your phones to your smart TV. Guests who use your wifi aren’t protected unless they have their own VPN.

With VPN on the router, all connected devices get VPN protection, because they can’t go through your router without creating that encrypted channel to your VPN server. That includes all your smart home devices, and many of them aren’t set up to fully use VPN software on their own.

Router VPN Limitations

Why, then, wouldn’t you just go ahead and install router VPN if it protects every device you use? Well, the biggest reason is that is doesn’t protect your phone or laptop when you’re away from home and hooked up to someone else’s wifi. The security of routers in public places can be notoriously lax, so those locations are where you may need VPN the most.

Also, the transmissions between your laptop and your router are not encrypted, although that’s not much risk if you have password-secured wifi.

Another drawback is that router VPN can be difficult to manage. You’ll have to log in to your router through a facility such as a Windows power shell by entering commands that aren’t particularly obvious or user-friendly. Once you’re at your router’s controls, you may find limitations in how you can configure VPN, for example, restrictions on which encryption protocols you can use.

Finally, depending on your VPN and router, installing router VPN may not be easy.

Installing Router VPN

Some newer routers come with VPN preinstalled. Others support connection to VPN services; however, routers marketed to consumers usually don’t have this. Some VPNs have built their products to install easily on certain routers; they provide a compatibility list.

An internet search on your router will tell you which VPNs it’s compatible with. Routers provided by ISPs are generally not VPN-friendly.

VPN on Both Device and Router

You can make sure you’re always protected by installing VPN on both your device and router. However, if you don’t switch off your device VPN at home, you’ll have overlapping VPNs and possible performance degradation. Some people deal with this by setting up two routers at home, one with VPN and one without.

If you watch any YouTube video or listen to any podcast, there’s a good chance that you’ve already heard about VPNs but might not know what they are. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and allows you to connect to the internet from anywhere in the world safely and securely (are the script reads from the podcast ads stuck in your head now?). If you’ve been curious about what a VPN can do for you, here are five of the biggest reasons why you should dive in and start using them yourself. 

5. Don’t Let the Boss See You

With the advances in IT, there’s a good chance that your company’s department can see every single thing that you’ve done on the internet. Have you tried to download an extension for Chrome or, god forbid, try to play a game for a few minutes? Your boss probably knows about it. If you’re using a VPN, though, you can have more freedom to not be tracked to the point where it feels like a massive invasion of privacy. VPNs allow you to get around network restrictions without revealing your browsing history, which might come in handy if you’re perusing LinkedIn.

4. Staying Anonymous

It isn’t just your boss or IT department that you can remain hidden from when using a VPN. Overall, you can obtain peak anonymity when browsing the internet on a VPN. Your true IP address will remain hidden no matter where you’re connecting. Instead, those that are looking for you will only find a VPN that was generated in the area in which you selected, meaning that there’s no way you can be traced.

3. No More Throttling

Your internet service provider already nickels and dimes you for using just a kilobyte of data, so why not fight back? When you use a VPN, you can set your location to wherever you want and avoid being throttled or even charged more for going over the mysterious (and frankly unwarranted) data cap. Set yourself to a country that has high speed internet without those data limits and you’ll be flying through the web at a lightning pace.

2. Public Wi-Fi Safety

Anonymity tends to go hand in hand with online safety. If you want to prevent people finding out who or where you are when using a public wi-fi server, using a VPN is the way to go. This is also true for people that might be known to the public eye, like a streamer, for example. While using a VPN, your data is encrypted and even on a modem where a password isn’t required, you’re getting the top level of safety.

1. Access to Content

These days, we’re all being stretched pretty thin due to the amount of streaming services that are offered. Between Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and the countless others, there are many that you might only want to use to watch one thing. Instead of subscribing to all of these and using big bucks to watch that one thing, see if it’s available on a free site like YouTube in certain countries. Getting around region locked content is perhaps the biggest reason that casual internet users get a VPN.

You need a password for everything these days. It feels like such a hassle, but if you have ever experienced the fear and frustration of having an account hacked, then you know how much passwords matter. The truth is that you need passwords, and they need to be secure, so here are four trade secrets that can help you keep your accounts safe.

The Longer the Better

It seems pretty obvious that a long password would be better than a shorter password, but you should know adding just a few extra characters to a password can make a huge difference.

For instance, let’s look at a password containing at least one lowercase letter, an uppercase letter, a number, and a symbol. If said password was 8 characters, a computer could crack it in around eight hours; if the password was 12 characters it would take 34,000 years.

Long but simple passwords, such as “catsruletheworldsecretly,” are easy to remember but difficult for a computer to crack.

Passwords can be made even more secure if you do away with dictionary words. The above password can be transformed into “C@tsRul3th3W0r1d5ecret1y” for maximum security.

Do Not Reuse Passwords

If you only have one or a few passwords that you use for every account you have, you could be in trouble in the case that your password gets cracked or leaked.

Many websites and services have had data breaches, some of which have resulted in passwords being posted online for anyone to view. This means someone could see your email and password combination and try it on any website in hopes that they get into your account.

Having a unique password for every single account you have is the best solution to avoid this. That way, even if one account gets exposed, your others are protected.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Some places might also just call it two-step authentication, or two-step validation. Basically, it adds another layer of security to your account beyond your password.

A common form of this is when, after logging in, the service requires you to input a code that they text to your phone. This step ensures that even if a hacker did get your password, they would be unable to access your account since they do not have access to your phone information.

Additional methods could require an authenticator app for access, an email with a code, a fingerprint, face-id, and more.

These steps add just a few seconds to your login time but offer significant protection for your accounts.

Don’t Write Your Passwords Down or Share Them

A notebook with a list of all your login information is a surefire way to remember all your passwords, but also an easy way for someone to get all the information for every single account you have.

Likewise, having a text document with your login information is possibly worse, since a hacker could access it remotely on your computer.

If you have trouble remembering all your passwords, try using a password manager. Password managers are programs that remember your passwords for you – in a secure way.

Lastly, keep your passwords to yourself. Even if you are only sharing your login information with someone you trust, there’s no guarantee they know the best practices for password security.