Big companies and big government get big press when their data is breached. And when a big company is hit, those whose accounts have been compromised are often notified. With smaller businesses, however, victims are often left in the dark, regardless of the various state laws requiring notification.
One reason for this is that smaller businesses [...]
Without question, 2011 is the year for hackers of all kinds to get their 15 minutes of fame. But it feels like it’s lasting a lot longer than 15 minutes. With so many different breeds of hackers, each with their own agenda and an endless supply of potential targets, the media has certainly been more [...]
More than ten years ago, when I began speaking to organizations about personal security and identity theft, headlines often read “Utility Worker Steals Identities” or “Human Resource Officers Steal Identities” and even “Police Officer Steals Identities.” Back then the primary concern was insider identity theft, perpetrated by those who had direct access to victims’ data.
Ecommerce [...]
Identity theft victims don’t need Jessica Van Vliet, an assistant professor in counseling psychology at the University of Alberta, to tell them that they no longer feel safe when conducting everyday financial transactions, which most of us take for granted. But she did a study highlighting a fact that many of us in the industry [...]
Cyber scams happen to the young and the old, the rich and the poor. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your credit is, or whether or not you have a credit card. Cybercriminals target everyone, regardless of how much or how little you rely on a computer.
The lowest of the lowlifes, however, tend to [...]
The Sony Corporation has been providing consumers with stellar electronics since before the introduction of the Walkman. The past six months have been harsher for Sony, with attacks by hacktivists and numerous breaches of clients’ data.
Many recent breaches involved usernames, passwords, email addresses, and in some cases, credit card numbers. Each compromised data point is [...]
Have you ever bitten into an apple and found a worm? I have, and it’s yummy! Anyway, how many times have you heard, or even said, “I won’t get that computer virus because I have a Mac”? While Mac users tend to feel somewhat insulated from viruses, it’s time for anyone who owns an Apple [...]
The most basic advice for protecting your own identity is to protect your Social Security number. The obvious solution is simply never to disclose your number, but this is silly, since, depending on your age, you have probably provided it to hundreds of people, on hundreds of forms. It now sits in hundreds of databases, [...]
Download the PDF version of Operation Shady RAT report
For the last few years, especially since the public revelation of Operation Aurora, the targeted successful intrusion into Google and two dozen other companies, I have often been asked by our worldwide customers if they should worry about such sophisticated penetrations themselves or if that is a [...]
To all you security companies out there, listen up: “identity theft protection” has become an overused and abused marketing term, which is often used to sell a product or service that doesn’t actually protect users from identity theft. It’s like labeling food “natural” when we know it’s not “organic.” It’s incorrect at best and a [...]