Protecting email While Traveling From Identity Theft - 07/29/09 02:46 PM
Identity Theft Expert Robert Siciliano
You’re traveling on business or vacation and you log into a public terminal to check email. You enter your credentials and then answer a few emails, delete some spam and fire a note off to a colleague at work. You log out and think nothing of it.  Meanwhile your email account is hijacked and everyone in your address book receives an email from “you”.
The email sent to your friends, family and business associates states; “While traveling in Europe I was approached by what looked like a homeless man who bumped into me, then he apologized. … (0 comments)

Child Identity Theft Victims - 07/28/09 04:52 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Jason Truxel was denied a mortgage because of bad credit. He had no idea that his credit scores were low, so he pulled his credit reports. He discovered a tremendous amount of debt, and accounts he had never opened. One such account showed that a credit card had been opened in his name when he was 13 years old. Jason found out the hard way that he was a victim of child identity theft. When Jason was a child, his father was convicted of credit card fraud. So he went to his father’s house and found … (36 comments)

A ‘Whac-A-Mole’ Approach to Preventing Identity Theft - 07/27/09 02:51 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Computerworld does a great job of aligning the childhood arcade game of Whac-A-Mole and information security. “If you’ve ever played the silly, maddening game known as “Whac-A-Mole,” you know what futility feels like. As you smack one mole with the mallet, up pops another one. Their speed and number escalates as you flail away, trying to keep up. At some point, you realize there’s no hope of winning.”
That’s why I hated that game. What attracted me to it was the same instinct that Barney Rubbles’ son Bam Bam had, I liked hitting stuff with blunt … (0 comments)

Social Media Privacy and Personal Security Issues - 07/25/09 05:15 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Privacy issues and identity theft in social media are a growing concern. Most people who post their personal information about themselves do not recognize the potential consequences of their actions, or maybe they simply don’t care if their entire life is an open book.
Ask yourself, should the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers, including the President, and who manages the operations, personnel, and budget of the CIA, have a Facebook page? Should his wife? Sir John Sawers is the incoming head … (0 comments)

Identity Thieves Gather Data From Social Networks - 07/22/09 08:13 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
There’s a lot of excessive trust in the Facebook world. People have entirely dropped their sense of cynicism when logged on. They have no reason to distrust. People who are your “Friends” are generally those who you “know, like and trust”. In this world, your guard is as down as it will ever be. You are in the safety of your own home or office hanging with people all over the world in big cities and little towns and never have to watch your back.
PC World reports a third of social networkers have at least … (3 comments)

Web Based emails Insecurity Leads to Identity Theft - 07/20/09 09:07 PM
Robert Siciliano identity theft expert
I recently appeared on Fox and Friends to discuss email hacking. Dave Briggs, a FOX & Friends Weekend co-host, lost access to his Hotmail email account when hackers were able to guess either his password or his qualifying question. (He admitted that his password was not as strong as it should have been.) The hackers locked Briggs out of his own account and spammed all of his contacts with a fraudulent email that appeared to be written by Briggs himself, claiming that he was trapped in Malaysia and requesting that someone help him by transferring money … (0 comments)

Tweets Link to Identity Theft - 07/17/09 01:02 PM
Identity Theft Expert Robert Siciliano
“Misty Buttons” just started following me on Twitter. She’s curvaceous, bodacious and isn’t getting her needs met. Apparently, she needs me to meet those needs. It is, of course, a tempting offer that someone, somewhere may accept. But I’m going to pass.
Twitter porn and cybercrime are one and the same. Criminal hackers use porn to lure unsuspecting Twitter users into their lairs, where they distribute malicious software and solicit credit card data. In some cases, their victims may deserve to be scammed. Clicking on the links that these ne’er-do-wells post on their Twitter feeds can … (0 comments)

Social Network is Accused of Identity Theft - 07/14/09 06:41 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
The state of New York, Office of the Attorney General plans to sue the social-networking site Tagged.com for allegedly using deceptive e-mails in order to gain new users.
It is alleged that the social-networking service stole the identities of more than 60 million Internet users by sending e-mails to people saying that members of the site had tagged them in photos but the photos did not exist and that Tagged raided their private accounts.
The e-mails that people received appeared to come from their friends via the website as an offer to look at the … (0 comments)

Sarah Palin Victim of Social Media Identity Theft, LaRussa Drops Suit - 07/09/09 11:39 AM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Sarah Palin has used Twitter and Facebook to communicate with the public. Impostors have taken every opportunity to jack her persona, even hacking into her personal email account.
Now, hackers and impostors are chiming in on Sarah Palin’s resignation. The Twitter profile for ExGovSarahPalin snags and reuses graphics, photos and tweets from Sarah Palin’s “Verified” Twitter acount, AKGovSarahPalin. This fake Palin account is still live as of this writing. In one tweet, a Palin impersonator invited followers to her home for a barbecue. Her security staff was reading these … (0 comments)

Social Security Numbers Cracked, Creates Identity Theft Risk - 07/07/09 08:57 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
SearchSecurity.com reports that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a reliable method to predict Social Security numbers using information from social networking sites, data brokers, voter registration lists, online white pages and the publicly available Social Security Administration’s Death Master File.
Originally, the first three numbers on a Social Security card represented the state in which a person had initially applied for their card. Numbers started in the northeast and moved westward. This meant that people on the east coast had the lowest numbers and those on the west coast had the highest. Before 1986, … (0 comments)

Identity Theft Expert; Fake IDs are as easy as 1,2,3 - 07/06/09 05:40 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Do an online search for “fake ids” and you’ll be amazed to discover how easy it can be to obtain an ID allowing you to pose as someone else. Or how easy it can be for someone else to obtain an ID that will allow him or her to pose as you. Some websites peddle poor quality cards, others offer excellent quality, and many websites are simply scams.
The fact is, our existing identification systems are insufficiently secure, and our identifying documents are easily copied. Anyone with a computer, scanner and printer can recreate an ID. … (0 comments)

Judge Rules; It is legal to post Social Security numbers on Web sites - 07/02/09 12:07 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
B.J. Ostergren is a proud Virginian. She’s known as “The Virginia Watchdog,” but I like to call her “The Pit Bull of Personal Privacy.” She is relentless in her efforts to protect citizens’ privacy, and she is primarily concerned with the posting of personal information online. So in order to make this point, she finds politicians’ personal information on their own states’ websites, and republishes that information online.
Publicly appointed government employees known as Clerks of Courts, County Clerks or Registrars are responsible for handling and managing public records, including birth, death, marriage, court, property and … (0 comments)

Identity Theft Credit Card Security - 07/01/09 06:03 PM
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Credit card fraud comes in two different flavors: account takeover and new account fraud. Account takeover occurs when the identity thief gains access to your credit or debit card number through criminal hacking, dumpster diving, ATM skimming, or perhaps you simply hand it over when paying at a store or restaurant. Technically, account takeover is the most prevalent form of identity theft. I’ve always viewed it as simple credit card fraud, rather than “identity theft” in its truest sense.
New account fraud, as it relates to credit cards, occurs when someone gains access to your personal … (0 comments)

 

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