Day-to-Day activities that increase risk of ID theft

Everyday activities like using their phone, browsing the web and shopping can increase their risk of becoming victims of identity theft.

Steven Domenikos, CEO of IdentityTruth shares his list of 8 everyday activities that increase an individual’s risk for ID theft – I thought you may be interested in sharing these with your readers?

Phone Home: Smart phones are more popular than ever. In the rush to grab a piece of the pie, phone vendors and carriers will perhaps sacrifice security for market share. While Apple vets all iPhone apps, some others - notably Android Market - do not. Fake banking apps have been discovered on Android Market and have been subsequently removed – but not before they were downloaded and used by an unnamed number of victims.

Apple, of course, is vulnerable as well. With the lion’s share of the Smart Phone market, the successful release of a rogue application, even if only for a few days, would result in a huge payoff for the perpetrators. A May 2009 survey conducted by Trend Micro revealed that 1 in 5 Smart Phone users admitted to having been the targets of phishing scams.

Staying Connected: It seems that everyone has at least one profile on a social networking site - and many people have more than one. Besides the spam friend requests that are received, presumably in an effort to get past the spam email filters, there are the add-on helper applications that pose just as much a danger as the rogue smart phone apps referenced above.

The data contained on these sites when combined with information contained on school re-union sites, resume and job-search sites and other public information could be used to build personal profiles, and enable identity thieves to steal your whole persona.

Check that URL: In October 2009, ICANN approved the user of non-western characters in web addresses. Beginning in mid-2010, one will begin to see addresses in Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic and others. With certain foreign characters looking like western characters, it is easy to see that the scam artists will use these to impersonate valid sites. Surely the security software will eventually catch up. But in the meantime, users will need to beware.

It’s in the mail: When you receive applications for “preapproved credit cards in the mail” be sure that you open and shred the enclosed materials before throwing them away. According to the US Department of Justice: Criminals may retrieve those applications to try and activate the cards for their use without your knowledge. Also, if your mail is delivered to a place where others have ready access to it, criminals may simply intercept and redirect your mail to another location.

Longer Log-ins: A recent report from Imperva shows the most commonly used passwords, including “123456” and “iloveyou”. Having such an easy-to-guess password – and worse, using it for multiple websites/services – makes you easier to target. Choose complex passwords that include both letters and numbers, never use the same password for more than one website, and change your passwords frequently – at least every 3 months.

To reply?: If you get an email from any institution - be it your bank, your credit card company or the IRS asking that you reply with sensitive personal information do not respond under any circumstances. These phishing emails are still used by identity thieves preying on people that are too trusting, or too rushed to think twice.

Trash that: Dumpster Diving is not an Olympic sport – it is a practice by which criminals comb through trash looking for personal financial information – cancelled checks, bank statements, credit card statements and more. Be sure to shred any and all documents containing any personal information before throwing them away.

Shop till you drop: Double check all receipts from stores and ATMS – they may contain account information that identity thieves can use. Also, try to avoid kiosk ATMs - those freestanding units often do not have cameras and are statistically more likely to be infected by skimmers (electronic devices that allow thieves to record account and PIN numbers).

Always check if there is a SSL Certificate (https://) present in the website while you do Online Shopping. Not only in a shopping site, but also check if the page is secure in case you provide your confidential and personal details.

Cyber Criminals and Internet Security

Today internet has become one of the most essential parts of the human life. Any small or big information that needs to be known is got in a fraction of seconds over the internet. Why Internet? – Because internet is a vast source of data and information. So let it be a shopping, banking, education, games, email or anything else, people just login to their computers, connect to the internet and source the information by just logging in to their online accounts. Just a small wonder, the prefix “www” we type in the address bar itself says “world Wide Web”, which says World Wide Information resource. So to safe guard the vast information resource, cyber security had been made the essential part of the internet, by the internet security industry.

Internet security industry as a whole compromises of internet security tool & applications, software and hardware development, new government rules and regulations, website security, network security and all the other things that is related to the internet. There are so many internet users prone to cyber attacks and become victims of identity theft. That is because people are not aware about the cyber criminals, waiting around in the internet to capture their data. So there is a need to educate the people about Information Security, and the enterprises, banking industry, Shopping portals, email service providers and all who have an online source have started alerting their customers, and their website visitors stating what needs to be checked while logging in to their accounts and so on.

How do cyber criminals act?

Cyber criminals pose to be “Phishers” or “Hackers”, who try to intrude into your network to gather all your personal and confidential details, for the sole benefit to acquire financial related information. To capture your data, cyber criminals, try to run spy bots- in a user’s computer by combing some spyware programs along with some freely available software. Once the user downloads and installs the software, the spyware also gets installed without the user’s knowledge and starts capturing all the information in the user’s computer and transmits the information to the third parties who we term as Cyber Criminals. So with the information the cyber criminals receive over the network, are used illegally to access the account of an unknown person, and take the necessary data, finance etc and elope. Finally the person who lost his money recognises that his identity is stolen. Not only the cyber criminals uses spywares, spy bots but also adware, viruses, worms, Trojans, Rootkits, key loggers and so many possible ways to hack a computer over the internet.

How to shield your computer from Cyber Criminals?

As the identity theft has increased today, the internet security software and hardware providers have been bringing many advancement to erode the activities of cyber criminals by providing latest internet security suite which include Anti-virus, firewall, antispyware, adware removal tools, parental control, backup, privacy control and many more computer security tools to shield a computer. Not only that many web services security companies along with webhosting companies provide measures for securing a website, and to prove its identity, and more over with antivirus solutions to protect the user’s computer, while uploading the relevant files to make a website live. Also many internet security forums, and consumer security forums, corporate, banks, educational institutions and all other people who are engaged to do business online has started creating the awareness to the consumers / customers, so that they won’t fall prey the phishers or hackers.

As a part of internet security awareness program, being a part of K7 Computing, I would like you to suggest K7 Computing Total Security, an internet security Suite, for you to have an enhanced and advanced protection for your computer.

Measures for safe and Secure internet and computers

The world is now connected to the internet, and almost 65% of the world population has started using internet as the mode for communication, banking, shopping and so on. In olden days all the official and personal data are being hand written or type-written in papers. So if an thief wanted to steal the data he needs to come, break the door and steal some confidential data and use it. So there were security guards and burglar alarm being placed to prevent, protect and safeguard from theives. But now the paper age has gone and computer age has boomed with recent technology developments. Since the invention of internet in 1957, when the soviet union started sputnik 1 its first satellite to beat the United States space, the internet age started. The invention of the internet made an easy choice for the theives, who we term as hackers (Online theives) steal the data from computers using the internet gateway. So to safeguard against data theft, we need to prevent and protect our computer from such kind of phishing and pharming attacks. I wish you can download your free trial version of Total Internet Security Suite, to check how it works and safeguards your computer.

So what is the security measures that needs to be taken to prevent identity theft?

As said earlier, in olden days we used security guards to protect an theif entering our office, likewise we need to have an protection software i.e. access – control software to be installed in the computer to prevent an hacker entering our system/network. So proactively an Desktop Firewall software needs to be installed which functions as a hacker intrusion prevention system. The firewall alerts the user whenever some one is trying to access our computer. So its our choice to allow, deny or block access to our computer network.

If at all, an thief enters in our office in disguise, showing an fake identity to the security guards, and once the security guards, knew that a thief has entered the office showing a fake identity, they will need to get alert and start detecting and prosecute the theif, and leaving him behind the bars. So comparitively if a user unknowingly allows, an application to enter into the system, and comes to know there is some changes happening in the computer automatically without the user‘s knowledge, the user needs to get alert on the issue. As the hackers, phishers try to get into the system writing some mailcious Software program ie. Malware or by using spyware, virus, trojans, worms etc to fetch the confidential data from the users computer on the backend. So inorder to detect and quarantine an unwanted program from our computer, an anti-virus software needs to be installed. An anti-virus software functions as a detection and virus removal software. Also some antivirus software comes with a Spam control option, where it would actively stop you from receiving spam mails, by blocking them.

Like having the burglar alarm, security guards and cops to safeguard your premises, its always good to have internet security suite as a computer security program, to prevent unethical hackers, known and unknown potential viruses and so on to have a safe and secure internet access in our computer. To prevent and protect is always better then cure. So its a good thing to have a computer security software, which acts as a protection, prevention, detection and cure tool. The recent IT trends has been giving so many technologies such as wireless internet access, laptops and so on, which is misused by the phishers causing serious internet security breaches. Though the internet threats are increasing day-by-day, as a user we need to be aware about internet security threats and protect ourselves from getting into the prey for phishing and pharming attacks.

Yuvaraj : K7computing.com

Where must we consider Internet Security?

The practice of protecting, preventing the PC from hackers and preserving private information and resources on the world wide web is termed to be internet security, Web Security, Website Security or Control Internet Access. Not only this but also there are few steps which needs to done to protect our PC too!

To secure our private inforamtion and PC some of the following features needs to be fulfilled. These might be like the below.

Routers - improves the security of a home LAN

Firewalls - Filters some bad website / content that create defense in depth.

Viruses, worms and trojan horses - Hackers are people who are in some unreputable companies writing programs like viruses, worms, trojan horses and spyware. These programs are all unwanted softwares that would be developed in a way that it install automatically in our computer through deception.

Browser choice - The one which should be consider while surfing on internet is the browser. Hackers prime target for phishing is by these kinds of browsers. So a secure browser or a software that secures your browser needs to be installed.

And some of the others where security needs to be considered is like Spyware, adware etc.