Tag: IDENTITY THEFT

Security firm Sophos has proven once again that, despite most of the attention and scorn being focused on companies like Facebook and Google, you are your own worst enemy when it comes to online security. The company ran an experiment in which it sent an invite to 200 randomly selected accounts to befriend one Freddi Staur -- an anagram for "ID fraudster." Of those 200 people 82 accepted the ...

Update: Facebook has temporarily suspended contact information sharing with developers. Share On Friday, Facebook quietly announced that app developers will now be able to access users' home addresses and mobile numbers, in a move that has already raised concerns among privacy advocates and security experts alike. Developers who take advantage of this new feature will still have to request ...

Several public and private entities have teamed up to battle online fraud by creating a streamlined method to report it. According to Ars Technica, Internet Fraud Alert is a service that makes it easier for security researchers to report the stolen consumer data they find online. For example, if a researcher finds a stash of stolen credit card numbers posted on the Net, he or she reports the find ...

Share You knows that it's not a good idea to publicly display your Social Security number. Believe it or not, LifeLock CEO Todd Davis had to learn this seemingly obvious lesson the hard way. According to Wired, Davis' identity, plastered across the company's advertisements, has been stolen 13 times since June 2007, despite his claim that paying LifeLock $10-a-month makes identity theft ...

Radio frequency identification tags (RFID), which appear in items like credit cards and passports, have long been susceptible to hackers looking to steal personal information. Still, RFID tags are used in many ways -- from tracking a shipment of clothes to automatically opening a doggie door. But a breakthrough from a group of University of Arkansas scientists might just ease the minds of those ...

The FBI has busted up a major spam and bank fraud ring that spanned from coast to coast, and even had ties to Egypt. Fifty-three suspects in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Charlotte, North Carolina have been indicted, with dozens of them already in police custody. An additional 47 Egyptian suspects have been named, and authorities there are working to apprehend them now. The scam centered around ...

In a strange twist on a now familiar story, an English woman last May found that her bank account had been accessed by criminals and that the money therein had increased. Amanda Fothergill, 40, of Darlington, received a phone call from a stranger who claimed to have deposited a substantial amount of money in her account. Shocked, Fothergill checked her balance only to discover a brand new deposit ...

The RSA FraudAction Research Lab has uncovered a sophisticated and tricky new phishing scheme. Dubbed the 'Chat-in-the-Middle' scam, the new attack targets the online customers of a specific U.S. financial institution and begins, as many scams do, as an apparently innocent log-in screen. The new twist, though, appears after the marks have entered their log-in information. Typically, once ...

If Indiana police's charges are true, George Helms collected identification cards like baseball cards. When it came to his alleged identity-theft scam, Helms seemed to be a careful man, but he didn't account for a new software program when he walked into the Hobart, Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV). According to CBS2 Chicago, police arrested Helms, who had filed paperwork and taken a photo ...

It's about time. The Associated Press writes today that mercifully, IBM reports that phishing attacks are on the decline. Phishing, for the uninitiated, has nothing to do with Vermont hippies. Phishing scams are typically comprised of a sketchy e-mail that links the recipient to a malicious Web page (often disguised as the log-in page of a bank or social networking site). There, the duped ...

Don't you love that lovely twist wherein the hunter becomes the hunted? Such was the case at the recent DefCon hackers' convention in Las Vegas, where a fake ATM was set up in the conference center of the Riviera Hotel Casino in order to steal account information from any gullible hackers who might cross it. Apparently, there were at least a few of them. (As of yet, no reports stating the exact ...

You wouldn't think that a business called A-1 Lock & Key would have too many break-ins. And you might not believe that a store called Jojo's Gun & Pawn would be prone to a rash of stick-ups. But Web broker and online marketing firm Network Solutions recently ran into a great big Network Problem when a hackers' long term infiltration of its servers left 573,928 names, addresses, and credit ...

South African crooks have recently focused their attention on Absa Bank, one of the African nation's largest financial institutions, by bombing several of the company's ATMs during the last year. In the Western Cape region, a popular tourist destination, authorities also claim to have identified approximately 40 data-stealing card-skimmers at various ATMs. To protect its machines -- and inflict ...

With more and more people using Wi-Fi-enabled devices -- from iPhones to netbooks to standard laptops -- the need for public Internet access is steadily growing. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are very aware of this fact and, according to Fox News, are exploiting it to the best of their ability. By creating phony Wi-Fi networks in places such as hotels and airports, crooks target carefree ...

Here is some terrifying news for those of you who are paranoid about identity theft: Criminals may be able to guess your Social Security Number (SSN) with little more than your birth date and home town. Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon have found that using only publicly available data, such as that posted to a Facebook profile, they were able to guess the first five digits of a person's SSN on ...