Calendar invites have long been an avenue for scams, but there’s been a surge in these kinds of attacks recently. Whereas people are starting to catch onto fake phishing emails, many aren’t suspicious of unsolicited calendar invites—and cybercriminals are taking advantage.

According to Business Insider, data from security firm Sublime shows that calendar-based phishing attacks increased more than 10x between July and August 2026. Microsoft also reported a sharp rise in such attacks.

Calendar invite attacks are dangerous because you aren’t expecting them and your curiosity gets the better of you. Scammers may send invites to fake meetings and/or insert messages about missed calls, unpaid invoices, or subscriptions that need renewing. The invites can also have malicious links embedded in them, just begging to be clicked.

And that’s the whole point. Scammers want you to open links, call numbers, visit websites. In doing so, you may end up entering your passwords or payment details on imitation sites, or download files laced with malware, or give up personal information to a faker on the other end.

In some cases, fake Google Drive links and AI-generated voices have also been involved to make scam invites seem more credible.

What you should do

One reason this method works is because calendar invites are typically perceived as more legitimate than mere emails. Furthermore, some calendar apps automatically display invites that haven’t been accepted yet.

To minimize your risk of becoming a victim, security experts recommend scrutinizing all unexpected calendar events as carefully as you would unexpected emails. Avoid opening links or calling telephone numbers contained in calendar invites from unknown senders.

It may also be wise to review your calendar app’s settings and change any automatic behaviors for incoming invites.

TL;DR: Pay $134.99 once for lifetime Babbel access to all 14 languages.

Learning Spanish is useful. Learning Spanish, French, Italian, German, and maybe a little Norwegian because you like a challenge? That’s where Babbel can help.

Through Oct. 13, new U.S. users can get lifetime access to all 14 Babbel languages for $134.99 (MSRP $299) with the StackSocial code LEARN.

You get more than 10,000 hours of language education. Lessons are broken into manageable 10- to 15-minute sessions and can be completed on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, with progress synced between devices.

Courses were developed by more than 100 expert linguists and focus on practical subjects such as dining, shopping, transportation, directions, making friends, and business. You can also choose beginner, intermediate, or advanced material based on your current skills.

Babbel combines those lessons with technology that helps you practice. Speech recognition helps with pronunciation, personalized review sessions reinforce what you’ve learned, and an AI Conversation Partner provides adaptive conversations for real-time practice.

You can even download courses, lessons, and review materials for offline access when Wi-Fi isn’t cooperating.

And because all 14 languages are included for life, there’s no need to commit to just one.

Get Babbel lifetime access for just $134.99 with StackSocial code LEARN through Oct. 13.

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StackSocial prices subject to change.

Amazon Prime membership includes loads of benefits—including the ability to shop Amazon’s best deals during big sales periods, like Prime Day and Black Friday. But here’s a secret: You don’t have to pay to take advantage of the benefits. At least, not at first.

Before you pay Amazon’s $139-per-year (or $14.99-per-month) subscription fee, you can sign up for a free trial. You get all the benefits of membership, including free two-day shipping on all orders, access to the Kindle lending library, Prime Video streaming, and much more. See our rundown of the top Amazon Prime benefits for the full list.

Here are a few ways to score a short-term Prime membership.

Two people can keep a secret if one is dead, or so goes the saying. But what happens when you share the details of your life with an AI agent? 

Unfortunately, data can’t die the same way humans do—especially so if Meta Muse is involved. Choose it as your AI executive assistant and you may end up revealing more of your personal life than intended.

Letting an AI agent work autonomously on multi-step tasks (like booking travel, making purchases, and even offering suggestions based on your plans) offers a deep view into your world. It requires direct access to connected services like your email account, too. But Meta doesn’t keep all of this information strictly private. By default, it trains its AI on your Muse data.

Deleting data also isn’t a complete wipe, either. Nuke a conversation or another interaction, and Muse could still retain info related to it. Meta describes this as “Muse may still remember information it learned from what you deleted.”

Meta says in its privacy policy that training data is anonymized, disconnected from the original users and scrubbed of personally identifiable details like names, Social Security Numbers, email addresses, and phone numbers. You can also ask Muse what it recalls about you—or go on an excavation tour of various Muse files, to see what still lingers after initial data deletion.

In a vacuum, this approach may have worked as a reassurance. But we live in the real world, where mistakes happen. Mistakes like a zero-day exploit that gave macOS apps and terminal commands access to Muse (and all its connected services), discovered just a couple of weeks after Muse’s launch. Or Muse allegedly gaining access to private messages, due to configuration settings in macOS that can allow the AI agent to see data in other apps

I have similar feelings as the security researcher who discovered the zero-day—I recommend not installing Muse on devices, particularly macOS. But I’d go one step further and caution against using Muse all together for now. 

Why? You don’t need to sacrifice your privacy or security to be a beta tester. (Yes, beta tester. For a service marketed as “built for everyone,” I’d expect it to be far more private and secure. An everyday person will not be reading privacy policies or following cybersecurity news the way I do.) 

Instead, wait for Meta’s Muse Confidential VM to launch. Right now, each Muse agent has its own virtual machine on Meta’s servers. Theoretically, this type of configuration should prevent Muse agents from reading data being stored or handled within other virtual machines. In practice, we already know that virtual machines are not bulletproof (their isolation from one another can fail). We also know that AI agents made by rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have escaped their sandboxes more than once.

Muse Confidential VM adds encryption as an extra layer of defense. Meta says such virtual machines and all their data will be “encrypted with a key only they hold, so not even Meta can access it.” If you’re going to hand your life over to an AI agent, keeping its developer (and any agents sharing your server) from reading your data is a smart move.

In the news

I’m wary of Meta and AI agents both individually and combined—for good reason. Meta of course has its history of playing fast and loose with user data, but AI agents are even more unpredictable. Hacking into the Australian government? Uploading user images to third-party sites? All in a day’s work.

The good:

• Signal, one of the most highly recommended end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, now supports encrypted local (on-device) backups for its iOS and desktop apps. You can also now do direct iPhone-to-iPhone transfers of Signal data. (Finally, less headache when setting up a new phone.)

The bad:

• As part of its ongoing investigation related to the Hugging Face hack, OpenAI disclosed another discovery of its AI agents behaving inappropriately. In this incident, 53 images from users were uploaded to third-party sites.

• OpenAI also detailed why one of its AI agents ended up hacking into an Australian government server. The short version: The agent just wanted to complete its task. If it weren’t so concerning, AI models’ single-minded focus on getting the job done would be admirable.

The ugly:

• Microsoft published a report on the use of AI in cybersecurity—and says that bad actors currently have the advantage. A particularly noteworthy stat? The speed between discovery of a vulnerability and its exploitation is now “well below 24 hours.” Good habits for computer use and online browsing matter more than ever.

The interesting:

• ShinyHunters’s hack into the FBI is turning into a saga. An arrest was made as part of the investigation, and the FBI also issued a direct warning to the group to turn themselves in. We learned how the break-in even happened, too.

Tip of the week

You know the password that unlocks your password manager. But do you also have your password to your email account memorized, too?

I always recommend that people commit these two passwords to memory. If you lose access to your password manager, you’ll avoid getting locked out of your email address. (Arguably, that’s worse than not having your password vault available.)

If your email account’s password is difficult to remember, consider changing it to a passphrase. (Six words long is recommended, and it should be randomly generated.) If not using a traditional password makes you nervous, also enable two-factor authentication. With such a combo in place, your account should remain secure.

TL;DR: Instead of grinding through video tutorials, flowkey listens while you play and provides live feedback, and a 5-year subscription is only $80 right now.

Learning piano on your own is tough and usually involves hours of staring at tutorials with little progress to show for it. If you want a smarter option, flowkey is an AI piano teacher that listens while you play and provides real-time feedback. A lifetime subscription is also on sale for just $79.99 (reg. $899).

As you play, the app listens through a microphone or MIDI connection and flags a wrong note the moment it happens. Wait Mode holds the lesson until you hit the correct notes, so a beginner moves at a comfortable pace. If you run into a tricky section, you can watch videos of expert pianists next to synced sheet music with slow motion playbacks to help you along. There’s also a loop function that repeats especially difficult sections until you really get it down. You can even select isolated hands you want to practice with.

The Classic Plan includes more than 1,000 classical and public-domain songs, with pieces from Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, and Mozart arranged for Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Pro levels, so you can keep improving with your favorite song.

Get a five-year flowkey subscription while they’re on sale for $79.99.

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StackSocial prices subject to change.

Online backup is your protection against any harm that might come to your computer or local storage devices. Mechanical failure, acts of malice, or natural disasters are serious threats to all of the data you have stored on your PC.

While I always recommend keeping a local backup for quick restores (see our roundup of the best Windows backup software for desktop solutions), uploading your data to a cloud backup service is a good way to cover your bases. There’s a valid reason for the “backup rule of three,” which includes an offsite copy.

Fortunately for consumers, there are myriad affordable and convenient online backup options, many with unique selling points. While my primary focus in this article is backup, I also discuss other roles that a cloud service can fulfill, such as document viewing and editing, file sharing, multiple-device support, and emergency-restore options. 

Note: You won’t see familiar names like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox on this list. Those are more accurately defined as synced cloud storage. Besides typically lacking a desktop client, and offering limited, if any, automatic backup functionality, online storage syncing involves mirroring — where any deletions or changes are reflected on the other end. Online backup uses versioning, so older data is retained — an important failsafe feature.

Why you should trust PCWorld for online backup reviews and buying advice: It’s in our name, PCWorld. Our reviewers have been testing PC hardware, software, and services for decades. Our backup evaluations are thorough and rigorous, testing the promises and limitations of every product — from performance to the practicalities of regular use. As PC users ourselves, we know what makes a product stand out. Only the best online backup services make this list.

Backup software with cloud backup/storage support

Typically, we separate our reviews of cloud backup services from local backup software (as seen in our best Windows backup software roundup.) But those lines have been blurred with backup software that includes support for cloud backup and storage. The following are reviews of such hybrid offerings:

• Dropbox Backup: Dropbox Backup is a nice solution for one-person account users, despite surcharges for long-term version retention.
• MSP360 Managed Backup: Backup for multiple computers at a decently low fee. Local and online, file-based and imaging, along with disaster recovery are all provided via manageable local clients.
• R-Drive Image 7.3: This backup program has expanded support for cloud storage services — including the Amazon S3 and S3-compatible repositories
• Iperius Backup Basic: This backup program offers power aplenty, but the learning curve and interface might occasionally flummox less-experienced users.
• EaseUS ToDo Backup 2025: A full-featured program that ranks among the top; its free version is particular robust.
• Handy Backup 8.5 Professional: Top-notch features might’ve garnered an Editors’ Choice award had it been entirely glitch-free and a bit easier to learn.
• Ashampoo Backup Pro 26: Overarching support for myriad backup chores with easy-to-understand wizards.
• Zinstall FullBack: Unique among backup programs, it offers full migration of backed up data and apps to a new OS installation — for a relatively steep price.
• Aomei Backupper Pro: A complete backup solution capable of preserving your important data both locally and remotely.
• Aomei Backupper Standard: A respectable free backup program, if you can tolerate the occasional ad. It’s cloud storage is affordable but can only be used for backups, no other data.
• Acronis True Image: Besides being feature-packed, including support for cloud backup storage, Acronis throws in protection against viruses and malware.
• Retrospect 19 Solo: We like that this backup program includes support for both proprietary and third-party cloud storage, but not its lack of disaster recovery.
• Retrospect 19 Desktop: The pro version to Solo’s consumer version, Retrospect Desktop covers all the bases, but has a steep learning curve and high price.

Even local backup software that doesn’t offer a formal cloud component can be made to incorporate the most popular online storage services, using a cloud storage manager.

The good news is that you have lots of options for putting together a comprehensive backup strategy including local and remote copies of all your data!

How to pick an online storage and backup service

Cloud backup has unique considerations. Familiarizing yourself with the following key areas can help you find the cloud backup service that best meets your needs.

Capacity

Obviously, you’ll need as much storage as you have data, plus a little, or possibly a lot, more if you want to track changes and save previous versions of files — if that’s supported. Some services keep multiple versions of files, some don’t. In many cases there’s a time limit.

Price

Nearly all online services charge differently depending on amount of storage involved. Uploads are free, but downloads may be limited. In some cases, there are upload and download charges. Read the fine print.

Aside from the free tiers available from a service like Dropbox, pricing is fairly consistent across services, though you definitely get more capacity for your money from some vendors.

Features

As we mentioned previously, in addition to backup, you may want to share your files with others, work with them from mobile devices, or even edit them with office applications such as those available with Dropbox, Google, and OneDrive. If you do intend to work online, we recommend that you maintain a local copy as far-more-quickly-restored backup, as well as a hedge against Internet downtime. 

OS and device support

Most services provide client backup software for the major operating systems (Linux, OS X, and Windows) and both Android and iOS. Make sure the service you sign up for supports your entire panoply of computers and devices.

Privacy

If you’re concerned about the privacy of your data, make sure you use a service that allows the use of a personal encryption key that you define. Do NOT lose it, as it is absolutely required to restore your data. Sadly, using your own key often limits the types of services (e.g., no mobile backup) available.

If private encryption keys aren’t available, read the privacy policy, especially with the free services—there are significant differences.