Robert Siciliano is a Personal Security Expert and Adviser to Intelius.com. For more information see Intelius at Criminal Check to reduce your chances of encountering a bad guy. See him discussing self defense on Youtube. (Disclosures)
People work hard to support themselves and their family. To enjoy all the benefits of your hard work, you need to have a good credit report and credit score articles. However, identity theft is being rampant nowadays. How would you feel if, one day, you found out that someone had managed to open your bank account and drain it. The person who has used your identity had made purchases running up an amount of close to hundred million dollars, and worst of all, you are left with the burden to convince the credit card company that you were not the one who incurred all the costs, but you were rather, another victim. What will your reaction be if these people opened bank accounts in your name, murdered someone using your name and left the country using your name? What would you do with identity theft?
A lot of innocent people are going to jail because somebody else decided that they want to use another name before they commit crimes. That is identity theft. There are a lot of things that we can do to prevent identity theft from happening. And surely, the law, as well as the police, is doing something about it. This article would talk about the bleak world of identity theft which can fall prey on anyone. We will try to see how anyone can gain access to your personal information and how you can protect yourself.
Credit Card Fraud
Some people can be very careless. Are you guilty of dining in a restaurant, paying with a credit card and leaving immediately afterwards that you’ve forgotten that the copy of the credit card receipt at the table? A lot of people are guilty of this crime although they are completely aware that these receipts do have credit card numbers printed on them. These card numbers are often exposed for everyone to see which then leads to credit card fraud, or the simplest form of identity theft. The simplest information that anyone can get from the restaurant receipt will enable an individual make purchases online or through phone without you knowing it. You’ll never realize everything until you receive your monthly statement where you will see that there were actual purchases that you, personally, did not make.
Credit card fraud is one of the simplest forms of identity theft. It can be successfully carried out by the process mentioned above, and sometimes, when your pre-approved credit card falls into the wrong hands. All that the identity thief needs to do is rummage through your garbage to look for pre-approved credit card applications. Once they have it, they simply can request for a change in address. Anyone who can access the right information can do it. You won’t entirely know anything because that’s how credit companies work. You will only realize how much you’ve lost when you receive your credit cad statement.
So what do they need? Your full name, social security number, and birthday. Once they have all these information, anyone who wishes to steal your identity can do so and apply loans in your behalf, open new accounts, buy cards, get insurance and a whole lot more. It does pay to think about the things that you throw in the garbage can.
Tina L. Douglas is a skilled writer from California. With numerous experiences in the field of writing for several financial institutions, she is greatly qualified across a variety of economic issues. Her notable pieces of writing involve identity theft protection.
You’ve always paid your credit card bills before they were due. Your rates on the few cards that you have are low as you’ve always been responsible for your actions etc.
Recently you’ve noticed that a few strange things have been going on and you’re wondering if you’ve been an identity theft victim. You’ve been receiving some phone calls from debt collectors, a credit card has arrived in the mail that you didn’t request or maybe you’ve even been turned down for a revolving charge card because you didn’t make payments on something else.
These things may be pointing to the fact that you’ve become a victim of identity theft. If you think this may have happened, there are a couple of things that you need to do right away, such as notifying fraud departments, check your credit report and definitely report your situation to the police.
Report the Problem to Fraud Departments
If you’ve become an identity theft victim, the first thing you need to do is report it to the fraud department of the three credit bureaus. They are Experian, Equifax and Transunion. You can choose to report just to one of the bureaus as they will pass it on to the others so that they are all aware.
As soon as the credit bureau is notified of the identification theft, they will flag the accounts of the person. When accounts are flagged, the potential creditors will have to call the person applying for credit personally.
If you’ve reported your identity theft, as a victim you can expect your personal account to be flagged for 90 days. After the flagging you will be notified that this has been done and given a list of other rights for victims.
After you’ve received this information you can obtain a free copy of your credit report. It’s also strongly advised that you make a formal request to the three credit bureaus that your account be flagged form the usual 90 days to 7 years.
Check over your credit report closely to look for items that seem out of place. If you find questionable entries you should inform the credit bureaus of them. After reporting the fraudulent activity, the credit bureau is under no obligation to reveal it to others who are authorized to look at your personal credit report.
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Brad Arkin, Adobe’s director for product security and privacy, recently commented, “We’re in the security spotlight right now. There’s no denying that the security community is really focused on ubiquitous third-party products like ours. We’re cross-platform, on all these different kinds of devices, so yes, we’re in the spotlight.”
Adobe, in response is doing everything a responsible software developer should do.
Adobe is the same boat today that Microsoft found itself in years ago. Ground zero. Hack central. Criminal hackers love it. Adobe’s software or files are used on almost every PC and across operating all systems. Every browser requires a program to open PDFs and many websites either have links with PDFs or incorporate Flash to play video or for aesthetic reasons. According to an estimate from McAfee, in the first quarter of this year, 28% of all exploit-carrying malware leveraged a Reader vulnerability.
While attention from the criminal hacking community has certainly been a burden to Adobe, the same attention is now being paid by the white hat hackers, the good guys. The security community is now actively involved in the reporting of bugs and vulnerabilities, which is helping Adobe tighten up. Fortunately, Adobe is learning from their current situation and is actively engaged in resolving these issues. They’ve created a better, more frequent software updating tool for each of their programs, including Flash and Adobe Reader. As difficult a situation as this may be, Adobe is handling it very well.
“Application security” is an often used term when, during the software development cycle, the software or application goes through a series of “penetration tests” designed to seek out vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the field. Adobe’s process now includes their Secure Product Lifecycle (SPLC) to seek out and squash those issues. It is important to understand that flaws, bugs, holes, vulnerabilities, or whatever you call them, are often detected after the launch of software. While both developers and criminals have many of the same tools, the bad guys seem to have an edge and are often able exploit those flaws before developers can find and fix them. Adobe however is beginning to turn the tide on the bad guys.
If you function in a Microsoft Windows environment, you should be aware of “Windows Update” and have it set to automatically download and update your operating system’s critical security patches. Updating Reader and Flash requires manual action, but Adobe’s built-in updater can also be set to automatic. I’d suggest that most users set this to automatic as well. If you have an older version of Reader, which may not include an automatic update option, you should head directly to Adobe.com to download the current software.
Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert adviser to Just Ask Gemalto, discusses credit and debit card fraud on CNBC. (Disclosures)
Facebook profiles are up for sale. In fact, a hacker known as Kirllos recently offered to sell 1.5 million of them for a hefty fee. Turns out the hacker didn’t actually have information on quite that many accounts, but he did start selling at least 1,000 accounts, priced by the number of connections. The powers that be at Facebook were able to identify the thief, but only after he sold a few thousand profiles. However, since he is located in Russia, it’s unlikely he will be punished for his crime.
Facebook has since announced increased security to help prevent this from happening again. For example, its software will let users know, either via an email or a text message, if their account is accessed from an unknown device. It will also check for concurrent log-ins and ask the user security questions if it notices them. This can help to prevent a fraudulent user from accessing the account from another computer while the legitimate user is online.
Even with all of these new security measures in place, the best way to protect your Facebook account is still just to use a little bit of common sense. What that means is that you should use a very secure password; one that a thief isn’t likely to guess and that is not likely to be guessed by automated software that runs lists of letters and numbers. To make a secure password, use a combination of letters, numbers and special characters that are in no way related to you or to your life. Don’t use your birth date, the name of the college you attended, your hometown or anything like that – despite the fact that those things are easy to remember.
And, while you’re thinking about it, don’t forget to leave personal details off of your wall, such as where you are, where you’re going for the evening, what your birthday is and who you are in a relationship with. If you don’t, you risk someone finding out these details, no matter how much you try to lock down your security settings. That way, even if someone unauthorized to is able to access your account, they won’t really have very much to work with. Also, don’t make your Facebook password the same as the password of any of your other accounts, particularly not your financial accounts.
The best way to share personal details with another individual is always in person – and in a low voice if you are in a public place as identity theft can start anywhere. To learn about the best identity protection companies and what they can do to protect your identity just follow the link to our easy to read comparison chart.
Protect Stored Information
Before a business can protect stored information which might be mobile and confidential in nature such as competitive business information or consumer personal information, they must know what information is vulnerable to exploitation and where they are. These are the first two steps of the Identity KAOS principles for protecting consumer identities. More people nowadays are storing confidential information, whether business or personal information, on their laptops and other types of storage devices which can be carried around for the convenience of accessing them when they are away from home or office. Some businesses might store payroll files and other sensitive documents while consumers might save account numbers and passwords on unprotected mobile storage devices to be accessed when needed. This information mobility also presents huge risks for every one because the unprotected information becomes more exposed to theft, loss and damage as it is carried around to some less protected environments. Of course, business management can protect stored information by providing protection measures to its employees such as encrypted devices or the ability to encrypt confidential files before taking them home, but employees can ignore the protection measures and therefore management needs to know who is storing what information and on which devices in order to prevent information loss or theft. In order to accomplish this task, automated tools are needed to prevent the loss or theft of the information but sometimes businesses and consumers fail to take such measures because human nature is designed to procrastinate and allow history to repeat itself over and over. In the case of some businesses, they solely rely on their policies, if they exist, to express their desire to protect stored information. However, desire is not enough to protect important information and must be followed by actions.
The problem for businesses, if they want to protect stored information, is that unless management has implemented automated and preventive controls to stop employees from storing customer information on various unprotected storage devices such as USBs and CDs, no one in the company can certify that customer personal information is protected and only stored where management has authorized. Policies alone which tell employees not to store select information on unprotected devices are not sufficient as they can be ignored by employees, however, enforced policies with automated technical tools can prevent the unauthorized storage of personal information and notify management of such attempts. In the absence of preventive technical tools, management is incapable of verifying where such information might be stored because it would be impossible to locate all personal information. Even if automated scanning tool are utilized to scan all computer servers to identify select information based on predefined criteria, there is no way to identify all locations and information as some of the storage devices may no longer be connected to the company network or not be readily identified or available for scanning purposes and verifying whether confidential information resides on the devices. Business management can only know where personal information resides only to the extent of their knowledge and authorization. This is one of the areas where technology security tools and resources become very useful for implementing the automated tools for preventing unauthorized storage and monitoring any violations from prescribed information security policies.
Return to the workplace security page after reading “protect stored information.