Creative criminals: with its nice alliterative ring, it sounds like a harmonious title of a reality show. Or perhaps some blooper reel where the “creative” is in a less reverent sense. This is nothing to do with television though, but rather another medium: technology. The human race had its humble roots with a barbaric caveman who first struck fire and was maddened and frightened by its implications, although he probably did not know what “implications” were. Soon enough though, or really through millions of years of natural selection, we found ourselves in the year 1950. At this point technology is just making its strong debut, with the radio and the television dominating the airwaves and creating sparks in the minds of the greats who will bring us even more advanced technology later.

Anonymous Proxy to avoid identity theft

Although we did not know it the abstract concept of a grassroots link between users would be manifested to the tangible, yet paradoxically intangible, Internet. This system allowed people to set up their own sites via the WWW service, and brought about many great things. Unfortunately, it is through the Internet that we find ourselves the victims of some of the most creative criminals.

The creation of MySpace, FaceBook, and other social networking sites where people can communicate to one another through personalized profiles and comment, blog, and rate each others own pictures brought about a social revolution. People became addicted to these sites, and soon enough criminals began to notice and try and exploit the general public’s naivete regarding Internet safety. Through the wonderful power of deceit the Internet provides, these ingenious crooks posed as friends of some people, and lured them into the real world to steal, abduct, etc. The more sophisticated criminals even earned themselves a special title of reverence: a hacker. These hackers manipulated computer infrastructure and security systems to go right into people’s documents or bank accounts and take whatever they want.

It can be easily asserted that everyone has visited a mall at some point in their lives. It is quite a place; tons of stores right next to each other, competing for lower prices and all within walking distance. There are also a multitude of stores to choose from; clothes are in abundance and are tools of the trade for malls of all sorts, but there are also house based stores, electronic equipment, music equipment, and even the odd gag gift store. These malls are often air conditioned quite nicely, but during the scorching summer months or the frigid winter months, can be to one extreme or the other. Also, the usefulness and competitive prices these malls offer bring in throngs of people, and one can often have trouble traversing from store to store, let alone accessing the crowded rest areas and trying to find a seat. As refuge from these malls, but with the convenience, price, and selection they offer, online shopping was born. Your wallet protects all of your data from being stolen.

Online shopping is a novel concept. Instead of actually carrying all of your groceries, clothes, or other miscellanea around with you, you simply add them to your shopping cart. The prices are still low, but you can shop from the convenience of your home and without the open and close hours that sporadic malls have. Also, you don’t have to carry all of your bags when you are shopping and worry about keeping track of receipts and all of that small stuff.

For years now we’ve warned people about the need fro privacy and how lack of privacy can lead to identity theft.  Many people think it can’t happen to them.  This You Tube video shows otherwise.  One expert hacker stole 130,000,000 credit card numbers.  Was one of them yours?

One of the issues raised in the video is the use of debit cards.  Again, for years we’ve been telling people not to use debit cards.  They do not offer the same protections that credit cards do.

However, the main item to take away from this, is that protecting your identity, and your privacy, is up to you.  You need to be proactive.  Think through the issues and put safeguards in place so that you do not wind up as a victim.

Information used to be stored in a manner that was easy to manage. They would have these giant computers that were large enough to hold terabytes of information (that is a lot!) that ranged from internal controls to customer’s profiles and user preferences. These servers  were encrypted and made secure by the companies that ran them. They were also password secured and this way only authorized employees could access the data if they needed to.  When they searched for easier network management, the answer was right in front of them: the Internet. With unlimited sconnectivity and always done at cheap prices, it represented a win-win for these companies.

By storing information on the Internet, it made their consumer’s data vulnerable.  The problem is, these monolithic computers were safe and secure, while the Internet wasn’t nearly as secure. The Internet can be easily hacked into, while these massive computers and their networks had so many privacy and safety safeguards that the N.S.A. would have had trouble trying to break in. The fact is though, the consumer’s lost this battle. While it helped out the big shot companies by removing their burden of network management, it hurt the consumers by having their security decreased by a large amount, and put their information at risk. “Cloud Computing” is the term put to this in discrepant practice of putting all information on the web rather than the large personal databases.

Identity theft is a huge problem nowadays. It really is a testament to the changing of the times; people back in the fifties would have seen identity theft and becoming someone else as a crazy science experiment gone wrong. Perhaps it is, but that doesn’t change the fact it is a risk everyone runs on the Internet today. The problem is, you put out so much confidential information every time you log onto your computer. You can be sure someone is seeing this and it is being recorded somewhere.

The next big problem is that this information is pretty much accessible to anybody. It may not be in a convenient button that says “information here” but it certainly doesn’t take an N.S.A. agent to install a deep packet inspector and steal some of your data. People travel around the Internet blissfully unaware and overall, quite unprotected. The security systems they do have were the ones installed (probably improperly) on their system when they bought it, if they even bothered to do so at all.

An Ohio woman is suing the county clerk because her identity was stolen. And it was stolen because an image of a speeding ticket, complete with her personal identification was placed on the Internet at the county website.

Initially, Cynthia Lambert’s case was dismissed and she had no recourse.  Her identity was just stolen and that’s all there was to it.  But last week she found out she could reinstate her claim.  The Hamilton County Clerk of Courts, Greg Hartmann, was in violation of Ohio’s Privacy Act when he posted the sensitive information online.

Ms. Lambert received the ticket in September of 2003.  The ticket contained her name, driver’s license number, birth date, social security number, address and her signature.  That is an Identity thief’s dream come true.  All that information could easily be used to take out loans, apply for credit card or open other accounts which can then be used freely without repercussions, as long as they aren’t caught.  They usually aren’t.  All the defaults become the burden of the person whose identity has been stolen.

“I thought I was being smart, slick and protecting myself and my information online.  It gets dull at work, and the company that employs me monitors what sites are visited at each computer station.  So, I would access the shopping sites by anonymously surfing the Internet.  I couldn’t be tracked that way. I believed any tracking cookies would be deflected by the free online proxy service.  So, I purchased a few items by credit card, and visited a few other sites, logging in with my screen name and password, feeling I was safely, anonymously surfing.

How wrong I was.  Two days later I received an email from my credit card company informing me my credit card was maxed out.  This was followed by another card being used to its limit.  Then I received another email thanking me for my business.  Supposedly, I had borrowed five hundred dollars.