Tech Tips

 

Avoiding Identity Theft.

Chances are, you do more than play games and store family photos on your PC. If you are like me, we use the PC to handle many different tasks including performing financial transactions, maintaining business-related and personal communications, and managing on-line records. The internet provides a simple and powerful way to access our bank account information, our mortgage accounts, credit card accounts, revolving accounts such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, and brokerage accounts. The criminals have taken advantage of this new reliance on technology to carve out a new type of crime - “Identity Theft”. It is a huge problem. According to the FBI, over 250,000 identity theft complaints have been made to the FTC, the governing body of commerce in 2006. However, the 2006 Javelin study estimated there were over 8 million victims of identity theft in that same year.

One of the ways this crime is perpetrated is through infecting un-protected PCs with spyware as they visit infected websites. Spyware comes in over 30 varieties or categories. Two categories that cause a great deal of fraud are keyboard loggers and BHOs – browser helper objects. The keyboard loggers grab all keystrokes, save them to a file then send the file back to the source of the perpetrator. Pretty boring if it captured your email to Aunt Bettye. However, if your monthly bill-paying session gets captured and sent to the bad guys, you could be in for a rough ride.

The BHOs are also a threat and a nuisance because they force your session to surf the sponsored websites first, or even exclusively. For instance, they could force your session through sexually explicit sites, or sites that have more sophisticated spyware that leads to bigger problems, or sites that do not let your session go anywhere else unless you pay for their specific spyware cleaner with your credit card. Wow.

It is clear that the threat of viruses, spyware, trojans and other “mal-ware” is real and real ugly. Although there is no absolute answer to this threat (accept to not use the internet at all), there are ways to minimize the threat to individual PCs.

First, keep your operating system patched and up to date. Next, use personal firewall, anti-virus, AND anti-spyware applications, and keep them up to date. Then, use common sense when providing personal information on the web. A good rule of thumb is: If you do not initiate the transaction, do not provide ANY personal information. And finally, watch carefully any content you place anywhere, such as MySpace, FaceBook, other blogs, on-line surveys, or un-solicited contact from your banks or financial vendors. One writer put it this way: You leave a trail of bread crumbs that never gets swept away.

Most IT professionals have their own favorite internet security applications, and I am no exception. Really, any of the legitimate titles are acceptable for small-business and home use. The key is to purchase the entire suite and keep all updated. I steer away from the free-ware titles.

In a nutshell, stay on your toes and do not let the bad guys get to you.