Dale Penn

If the gatekeepers are concerned, we should be too!

If you haven’t seen reports of  the latest Identity Theft attacks plaguing our country, you haven’t been reading much news lately. Where have you been?

Even the U.S. Air Force has waged an ad campaign designed to capture the imagination of a new crop of tech savvy young recruits to help fight the current “cyber-war”. This war is not imagined or “virtual”, it is very real indeed.  

The battle is raging on many fronts. In addition to the constant daily threat from foreign governments, bored adolescent hackers and low level organized criminals, there is a new enemy emerging.

Symantec Corporation is losing sleep due to concerns about the next virulent strain of Trojan horse programs.  According to the April 2008 issue of PC Magazine, the Trojan.Silentbanker program can perform “man in the middle” attacks between users and more than 400 banks.

This Trojan monitors usage patterns on the web, while looking for bank data that it can manipulate. This program can actually re-route the account destination of banking customer transfers. Apparently, the Trojan.Silentbanker can even overcome the “safeguard” of two -factor authentication.

The article correctly distinguishes between a single bank target like those that are cloned by realistic looking “phishing” sites and the multiple bank sites susceptible to this Trojan program.

Symantec’s well known suite of anti-virus and personal firewall products are designed to protect from these threats. If you are not in the habit of updating yours, you are headed for a hard fall someday. PC Magazine also reminds never to run executables we get from strangers.

Thank goodness for warriors like our Air Force and Symantec who “sit on the wall” for us and fight evil at every turn, keeping us from losing more than just our shirts.

Be afraid…..be very afraid.

We live in a world where our personal habits, personal preferences, personal information,  and private lives are sometimes taken for granted. Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer now realizes the folly of this careless, foolish and whimsical approach.

Last week, msnbc.com reported about the rash of failed savings and loans who are dumping mountains of personal information into trash bins as their businesses shut their shingles, fold their tents and abandon their clients.

The article chronicles the failure of First Magnus Corp. who was one of the largest mortgage lenders in the nation. The company was hailed as a “powerhouse” of savvy technological innovation. As unimaginable as it seems, “tens of thousands” of  documents including credit card and social security numbers were “dumped” in a nearby trash bin.

It now appears that every personal tidbit we make available in the process of securing credit for mortgages and secured or unsecured personal or commercial loans is up for grabs and beyond our ability to provide or even expect protection. Is that line of credit really worth the open exposure of all your personal data?

This new reality hit home for me today as an eagle-eyed industry associate correctly pointed out that a commercial lender who served each of our company’s mutual business clients had suddenly collapsed, leaving their customers and pending applicants’ data completely unaccounted for.

Mountains of juicy private data files are turning up in dumpsters and garbage cans all over the country. This criminal carelessness leaves us all exposed and hopelessly vulnerable beyond our control.

What’s a consumer to do? Protect yourself at all costs. Private identity theft insurance, regular credit monitoring and reactive credit restoration services are all good ways of keeping your guard up. To avoid pro-active identity self-defense is foolish.

The reality is that the information that passes through our hands and into the care of nameless, faceless, careless corporate grunts cannot be safeguarded with any degree of reliability.

Despite the fact that the Fair Credit Reporting Act was amended by Congress in 2003 to mandate better consumer privacy protection, commerce and industry must each do their part.

Because of the implosion of the sub-prime lending industry, many phone lines are down, many office cubicles are empty and many trash bins are full. In the new financial frontier its “every man and woman for themselves”.

Why not begin your proactive identity theft prevention/resolution plan today?

Think Id Theft is a “victimless” crime? Think Again!

In the years that I have searched for the telltale signs of “identity vulnerability”, I’ve often peeked into some rather innocuous and predictable places.

We don’t like to think of this crime as a gritty, true crime. After all, ID theft isn’t as bad as a typical violent TV crime-drama crime is it?

In fact, a little known reality is that the victims of identity often feel the same impact and violation as victims of violent crime.

Last week, an Illinois jury sentenced Eric Hanson to death for the murder of his parents, sister and brother in law. The four were found dead in an upscale home in the nearby city of Aurora.

In addition to first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and armed robbery, Hanson was found guilty of identity theft. He was accused of stealing $80,000 from his parents in a credit card fraud scheme.

Hanson’s killing rampage began when his sister informed the family that he had ripped them off for the money in the credit card scam.  Prosecutors claimed the convicted murderer and ID thief killed in a sick sad attempt to cover up his evil caper.

Statistics reveal that a large percentage of ID theft occurs within families. Scary eh?