==================
Phishing is the stealing of identity information from users
online and has become one of the biggest dangers of unknowingly
giving away your personal information.
According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the number
of Phishing incidents is increasing at a rate of 56 percent
every month.
Phishing can be done on an unsuspecting victim who receives an
email that comes from a respectable business, such as a bank or
other types of financial institutions and the email links the
victim to a web site where he or she is asked to provide
account information. What is scary the site in which you have
been directed to looks legitimate and about 10 percent of
people who receive these types of emails fall prey to these
crooks.
Thousands of computers are compromised each day without the
user ever knowing they have unwillingly given up their private
and personal information.
Phishing is automated identity theft. Gartner Group estimated
in that 1.78 million Americans had already given their
information to phishers with a cost to U.S. consumers and
industry is 2.4 billion dollars.
It is a good bet that everyone who has an email account has
received some level of Phishing. Anytime you have received an
email from what appears to be a legitimate business that has a
well known presence on the internet has been used to steal your
personal information. The type of information being requested
is passwords, usernames, account numbers, credit cards, social
security numbers and any other data that will allow the
criminals to take your identity and money.
Identity theft is the fasting growing crime in the United
States. Can you imagine having criminals take out a second
mortgage on your home or better yet purchase a home using your
credit information, fraudulent charges on your credit card.
If you receive an email as described above and provided the
information most likely you are a victim of Identity theft.
Some of the businesses being impersonated are banks, auctions
sites, Internet retails, charities, financial institutes and
any other internet transaction base site. Keep in mind that
most of the impersonating is of the Larger companies that are
well known, but it is just a matter of time that all of us will
need to be on high alert.
Even if you don’t answer the email you can become a victim with
the use of spy ware or Trojans. In this case you don’t have to
supply any information. The victim’s computer is compromised
and sends the information to the phishers on its own. This is
known a keystroke logger that watches for usernames, passwords
and other financial or personal information.
Who is doing the Phishing?
Serious crackers are sophisticated and don’t care who they work
for, they can develop their own spy ware, run scripts through
email or websites, compromise networks that are behind a
firewall and generally cause disaster.
Organized Crime and criminal syndicates are responsible for the
most elaborate and thorough phishing scams. This group hires
the serious crackers to develop websites to recruit mules for
money laundering; they can create fake credit and Cash cards
with your personal information and use them anywhere they want.
It is said that this is the most dangerous group and create
most of the identity theft.
Terrorists are currently profiting from your identity, in 2002
the FBI stated the following in congressional testimony:
The impact of Identity theft is greater that just the loss of
money or property. Terrorists and terrorist groups require
funding to perpetrate their terrorist agendas. The methods use
to finance terrorism range from the highly sophisticated to
most basic. There is virtually no financing method that has
not at some level been exploited by the groups. Identity theft
is a key catalyst for fueling many of these methods.
Just be careful and don’t respond to emails. Call the financial
institutes that you do business with to verify the email and
also notify them of incident.
About The Author: Ralph Winn has over 32 years of experience in
the security industry. Throughout his career, he has developed
cost effective security programs for numerous small, medium,
large commercial and government properties and for many
nationally known corporations. http://www.homesecuritystore.com
Please use the HTML version of this article at:
http://www.isnare.com/html.php?aid=155752
==================