Do you need to change your PIN password, or just your attitude? - Times Online - Via Times Online UK:

We are all more or less vulnerable to those ingenious internet villains and their scams, but we can do a lot more to put a spanner in their wicked cyberworks

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Out there in the parallel internet world, someone wants to be you. Not for long, of course: just long enough to clear out your bank account, take out a large loan in your name and potentially ruin your financial life for years to come.

The loss of 25 million sets of personal details by Revenue & Customs has focused attention, as never before, on the vulnerability of personal data and the dangers of identity theft. Security experts point out that the problem has been steadily growing over recent years, requiring new laws and new safeguards but above all a cultural shift in the way that individuals regard and protect the numbers, letters and secrets that make up their financial identity.

Identity fraud costs Britain £1.7 billion a year, with a thriving black market in stolen identities in which credit card numbers and birth dates change hands for as little as £7. Criminals are developing ever more sophisticated ways to steal personal information, and security firms are developing ever more complex (and expensive) ways to stop them.

The growth of online banking, the boom in internet sales and the spread of social networking sites have all made personal financial details more accessible. Last year alone, 178,000 people in Britain fell victim to identity theft.

Individuals can take precautions, but what is really needed, security experts say, is a change of attitude, a broader realisation that information on the internet is in the public sphere. Because people work alone on a computer, this often gives the false impression that they are operating in privacy, when precisely the reverse is true. People who would not dream of revealing personal details in the real world simply do not use the same safeguards in the virtual world.

Garlik, a company specialising in online identity protection, recently commissioned an in-depth survey of identity fraud that involved scores of interviews with fraudsters. According to Tom Ilube, chief executive of Garlik, the survey found that not only are online identity thieves becoming more specialised and organised, but they are focusing their attentions on the web, where all the information necessary to steal an identity is readily available.

“One fraudster said to us, ‘The internet’s great. It used to take me two or three weeks to gather the information I needed – now I can do it in a few hours’,” Mr Ilube said. “You just need to know how to put together bits and pieces from the web and make use of them. I say to people, ‘Don’t put anything on your Facebook site you wouldn’t want to see on a billboard in Piccadilly Circus’.”

Just as many still imagine the internet to be semi-private, so fraudsters treat identity crime as if it were something less than illegal and immoral. “People who would never dream of picking pockets or shoplifting will do things like this online and not think they are behaving criminally,” Mr Ilube said. “A new generation of young criminals is emerging that is comfortable with cyber crime.”

(Read Original Article - Via Times Online UK .)