Identity Theft And Password Protection
We’ve already addressed some of the most common approaches online con men will use to rip you off. But distant one-time stings and quickie scams are just part of the story. Indeed, imagine how much worse it would be if the bad guys had full access to virtually all your important personal information? It would be full-scale identity theft, and it would be bad. Real bad – perhaps life-changing bad.
There are a variety of ways this can happen, and many of them are documented above. But one area we haven’t yet touched upon involves those unscrupulous types with a fondness for passwords. Your passwords, in particular.
Scenario #1: Say you enjoy blogging or yapping at a social networking site about your pet rat Samantha. She’s a fine rat to be sure, with perfectly groomed whiskers and an immaculate pedigree, but you clearly care about this rat more than most of us care about our rats – perhaps so much so that you might use her name as the password at an online retailer such as Amazon.com – or worse, at your online banking site. The bad guy has been watching you and already knows where you live. He’s done his research, and has used any one of a number of means – say, rooting through your garbage can for those unsolicited credit card application forms you always toss out – to dig up other information as well. Armed with this ammunition, and now with what is potentially your password too, he’s well on the road to hardcore identity theft.
Scenario #2: You’re a traveling salesman – or, at the very least, a traveling somebody. You tend to use computers whenever and wherever you get the chance. Today, you’ve visited the local library in some forgotten town in the middle of Montana for a little Internet time. You surf about like you always do, logging into a variety of sites along the way. Sadly for you, a nearby library “patron” was stealthily watching your every move. Worse still, he was filming it via a hidden camcorder. In any case, he now knows enough about you to either put you in the poor house or impersonate you and make you look like the bad guy.
How to avoid:
• Varying your passwords between sites is a great way to keep the crooks guessing. One problem: Monitoring and remembering all those passwords is a real hassle. But that’s why password management utilities exist. They randomly generate unique passwords for each of the sites we visit, yet ask only that we remember one. RoboForm (www.roboform.com) and KeePass (http://keepass.info/) are two of the leading password managers available today.
• Ensure the website you’re visiting and is secure. If you’re on a secure site, you’ll see “https” rather than the regular “http” in the address bar and a lock icon in the status bar. Naturally, fraudsters have already devised a way to spoof even these identifiers, but you’ll definitely know you’re not on a secure site if you don’t see both.
• Once more for good measure: Install and regularly update Internet security software.
• Refer to the Federal Trade Commission’s Identity Theft Site at (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/) for more information or if you feel you’re a victim.
