Dale Penn

Recently, the Identity Theft Resource Center looked forward to the coming year to predict events that will be the inevitable outcomes of the current economic crisis and the looming identity theft battles.

Real Estate: Homeowners who are behind on payments or seeking refinancing sources can easily fall prey to unscrupulous thieves who are more than willing to “take your information and see what we can do”. Bogus land grants and home equity scams will be commonplace. The recommendation is that homeowners speak directly with well known and established banking and mortgage companies in order to avoid the potential pitfalls of unknown solution providers.

Credit Cards: Many consumers may unknowingly turn to thieves in order to get access to credit cards, debit cards and debt consolidation loans. It is easy to imagine handing over private information to seemingly legitimate companies. Like the mortgage industry, the credit card world has been turned on it’s head in the current economic climate. Look before you “leap” into a deal that may be too good to be true.

Check Fraud: Due to the lack of easy credit, many thieves will turn to check fraud as a way to accomplish their crimes. Needless to say, safeguard your checkbook, deposit slips and banking statements as a first line of defense. Many financial advisers are steering clients away from using paper checks at all. If you must write paper checks, be sure to use an anti-check-washing gel pen and keep a close eye out for any irregularities on your statement.

Organized Crime and Cyber-Thieves- Rings of professional thieves from all over the world have helped make identity theft the fastest growing crime in the United States. Security experts agree that these attacks will become more brazen as time goes by. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been reviewing “worst case scenarios” for possible attacks against U.S. government, industrial and financial institutions.

Consumer Scams: Common and rampant scams with nicknames such as skimming, phishing, vishing, pharming and whaling will continue in 2009. This is largely due to the weak condition of the U.S. economy, the vulnerability of average consumer and law enforcement’s scarcity of resources to deal with the sheer volume of complaints.

Breaches: Corporate, educational and government security breaches continue to grow every year. According to the ITRC, there were 641 breaches in 2008, surpassing the total of 446 in 2007. Due to the portability of data, the easy theft of laptops, the cunning deception of “inside scam artists” and the desperation of global perpetrators, this number will continue to increase. At the very least, have your own laptop or PDA/smart-phone set up with encryption and password protection software.

Remaining diligent, alert and informed about the latest scams and threats is your best defense against being victimized in 2009. Stay tuned.

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.