Most phones allow you to add apps to them manually, without using traditional stores such as Google Play and the Apple App Store. While these apps may seem useful, there’s no reliable way to tell if they’re completely safe. It’s best to avoid sideloading apps altogether unless you’re completely sure the app is legitimate.

Modern credit cards often have three mechanisms for in-person purchases – swiping, chip insertion and tapping. From a security perspective, chip insertion and tapping are much more secure and should be used if available. Mobile tap-to-pay solutions like Apple Pay and G Pay are also very secure.

Whether you’re trading it in, donating it or handing it off for any reason, you’ll want to wipe all the data from your phone before doing so. While the process for this varies by phone, you can easily find out how by searching your settings for something that says “Factory reset” or “Return to factory […]

While defragmenting a platter-based hard drive is a necessary part of maintenance, attempting to do the same thing on a solid state drive is asking for trouble. This can lessen the lifespan of the drive and cause errors. Solid state drives don’t use platters, as all the data is in a, well, solid state, so […]

Making a robust password is only part of the password battle. If there’s a publicly disclosed data breach that affects your account, then you’ll want to change your password immediately. You also need to update your online passwords regularly to hedge against the possibility it may be compromised.

All major desktop and mobile browsers let you create bookmarks for individual websites, which can be clicked from a list to visit the site. It might seem like a minor feature, but it’s a good security improvement, since it spares you from needing to manually type in URLs or click on links in emails or […]