Americans face unprecedented threats to the digital safety of their personal information. “We offer nine tips to foil hackers, ransomware, online trackers, data brokers and other menaces,” by Julia Angwin, ProPublica, Jan. 26, 2017.

“We are living in an era of widespread hacking and public shaming. Don’t like your political rivals? Beg Russia to hack them, and their emails mysteriously show up on Wikileaks. Don’t like your ex-spouse? Post a revenge porn video. Don’t like your video game opponents? Find their address online and send a SWAT team to their door. And, of course, the US government has the capability to do even more. It can spy on much of the globe’s Internet traffic and has in the past kept tabs on nearly every American’s phone calls. Like it or not, we are all combatants in an information war, with our data under constant siege. So how can ordinary people defend themselves? The truth is you can’t defend everything. But you can mitigate threats by reducing how much data you leave exposed for an intruder to grab. Hackers call this minimizing your “attack surface.” The good news is that there are some easy steps you can take to reduce the threat. Here is what I am doing this year…”