How to spot even the most realistic email scams

Q: I recently received an email offering a temp job working with one of my professors at my university. The email asked me to send my contact information if I was interested. I sent my name and my phone number and got a call back that was obviously a scam and definitely not my professor. Is my data or my identity at risk now that these scammers have my phone number?

A: These kinds of scams are a lot more common that you might think. The scammers are counting on young people to be a little less vigilant and a lot more susceptible to the idea of making a little extra money.

If you managed to sort out the whole thing was fraudulent and you were not tricked into sending any money or anything else of value, you are probably OK.

While our phone numbers are a piece of our identifying data, they are not terribly useful as a means of identity theft.

The scammers wanted your money and when they figured out you weren’t falling for it, they moved on.

If you receive an email like this it’s usually pretty easy to tell it’s a fake. The sender uses the name of someone you know and trust, but if you look at their email address it’s usually from a service like Gmail or Yahoo!, where anyone can get an email account without much trouble.

Q: What’s the best tool for permanently deleting files from my hard drive?

A: For day-to-day use, simply moving files and folders to the Recycle Bin and then emptying it should be sufficient.

But if you are really wanting the file to be gone forever, there are tools that can make this happen.

Eraser from eraser.heidi.ie and File Shredder from fileshredder.org come to mind, but there are many others.

The idea behind all of this is that when you delete a file, it can be recovered with the right tools.

File deletion apps like the ones I mention delete the files and overwrite the space on the drive where the files were, making recovery difficult to impossible.

Of course, if you’re looking to wipe your entire hard drive, there’s no better tool than Darik’s Boot and Nuke from dban.org.