By Krista on Mar 19, 2007 in Identity Theft, Legal, Privacy, Security | 0 Comments
Last year, Dov Tenenboim of North Bondi hacked into at least 90 different eBay sellers’ accounts and sold $13,482 worth of non-existent Apple iPods. Last week, he pled guilty. Tenenboim went after eBay users with easy-to-guess passwords - such as those that use their seller name as their password.
When referring to the case, an eBay spokesperson stated the obvious
“What the case highlights is the importance that people need to place in choosing a sensible password,”
Read the rest
By Krista on Aug 29, 2006 in Identity Theft, Privacy, Security, Spam | 0 Comments
Phishing scammers are adding voice over IP (VoIP) technology to their mix and ensnaring victims over the phone. In phishing schemes, scammers send an email impersonating from Paypal or a high profile bank. They usually mention that your account is about to expire or they detected fraudulant activity and ask you to log into a site to correct the info. The site you are referred to looks just like Paypal’s or the bank’s website, but it’s not affiliated with the company. When you log in, you effectively hand over your username, password, and any other sensitive data you input directly to the scammer. Read the rest
By Krista on Aug 13, 2006 in Privacy, Security | 0 Comments
Last week, AOL released 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users. A few hours later, they realized this was probably one of the dumbest things they could have done, quickly removed the data, and apologized. A mirror site containing the 439 MB compressed download is still available (it expands to 2GBs) and is some fascinating stuff for anyone interested in search behavior, data mining, or online marketing in general.
For those of you who don’t want to download the info, there’s a number of web interfaces up at AOLSearchDatabase.com, AOLSearchLogs.com, and AOLStalker.com to allow anyone to search the database - or you can get some of the highlights from CNN.com. Read the rest
By Krista on Aug 4, 2006 in Identity Theft, Privacy, Security | 0 Comments
According to a July 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report, 68% of internet users - 93 million Americans - experience computer problems that can be traced back to adware and spyware.
There are two types of threats that can be considered spyware: Read the rest
By Krista on Jul 29, 2006 in Identity Theft, Security | 0 Comments
According to a 2005 study by Javelin Strategies and the Better Business Bureau, 48% of all identity theft victims reported that employees, friends, acquaintances, relatives, or their own carelessness was to blame rather than hackers. Less than 12% was the result of computer related crimes.
Visa USA and the US Chamber of Commerce are sponsoring a nationwide lecture series to crack down on identity theft at the point of sale. They say businesses should work to improve data security in 4 key areas. Read the rest
