According to the Federal Trade Commission, there were over a quarter million identity theft cases reported in 2010. The most common method was email account hacking.
Identity theft can lead to having all of your bank accounts emptied, having credit cards or utilities opened in your name, or someone posing as you and committing crimes. Many people have no idea how to protect themselves from these attacks and essentially give their information away. The tools used for these attacks are well known and widely used. When you sit down at a book store or coffee shop, you may very well be a victim and never know it.
One of the best ways to protect yourself from attacks is through safe internet browsing practices. People connect their computer to millions of other computers every day. Wouldn’t it be great if there was the equivalent of an internet condom to protect you from viruses, worms, trojans (malicious software posing as something benign), and identity theft?
Some of the best internet practices are to use HTTPS and network firewalls. When you buy something from an online store, you usually see HTTPS in the address bar followed by a lock icon. The HTTPS protocol encrypts all of the data you send. Firewalls help keep you safe by not giving an outside computer access to your system unless you let it. Firewalls also can allow you to lock down your own computer from sending information out when you don’t want it to. You’d be amazed at how many legitimate programs on your computer try to call home and send personal information about you to another computer without your knowledge.
More advanced users may use software such as anonymizers, secure tunneling proxies, virtual private networks, or TOR – The Onion Router. In all likelihood, many readers have never heard of any of these tools. You should. They have been vital to the Arab Spring revolutions and free speech around the world.
These tools are not just used to hide your identity from prying eyes, they are widely used by corporations to protect secret information and have important uses that people should know about. Not only can they help prevent would be attackers from accessing your sensitive information, you may one day need them to coordinate activist or revolutionary operations if the government or corporations shut down access to websites such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Change.org, and independent media organizations such as Wikileaks.
Everyone should know to check for the HTTPS in the address bar before entering any important. Google now allows searching with HTTPS to prevent your search questions from being intercepted by your internet service provider or man-in-the-middle attacks. Anonymizers, proxies, SSH tunnels and ad blocking software such as AdBlock Plus for Firefox and Chrome help you navigate the internet without having your activities tracked by advertisement companies.
Why would you need something like this? You’ve got nothing to hide, right? Wrong. When was the last time you logged into Facebook at a coffee shop? Did you know that for years Facebook didn’t offer HTTPS support? This means at any one of those times your username and password could have been stolen out of the air and you would have never known.
Many people use the same password for multiple accounts. An attacker who now has your Facebook password also has your email address stored in Facebook, which means you may have just given them your email account password.
If you have receipts, bills, or other passwords in your email, you may have just given them access to your bank account, bills, and address. You essentially have handed them your entire identity to wreck, all because you wanted to post a quick status update. This is a very real danger, and can happen if you don’t practice safe internet browsing.
Hopefully I’ve awakened some people to a digital world that goes on behind their back. It might be a wise choice to buy an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science major a drink or lunch in exchange for them teaching you how to protect yourself, your identity, and your computer.