Come the New Year, the federal government will be completing its periodic population census. The United States Census Bureau is telling Americans not to expect any e-mails from the Bureau in light of the recent age of e-mail scams and phishing attacks. No personal information such as PIN numbers, passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, or any other financial account information will be requested via the Internet. Cybercriminals would most definitely target any website or email service receiving and storing such valuable data. The consequences of such a hack would be astronomical if a system containing every American’s personal information were to be infiltrated into.
Identity theft is becoming more and more of a problem in today’s society. And finally the federal government is beginning to take action. So many different networks and websites ask for personal information and store such data. The Identity Theft Resource Center has reported 379 data beaches affecting more than 13 million individual records as of September 22, 2009. More than 13 million? That is a significant number of people. Once again it must be recognized as to how much of a serious concern and security threat this is. Data and information security is becoming more and more vulnerable than ever before. Hackers are engineering new and innovative ways to access and infiltrate even the most secure networks.
Some of the ways to protect your personal information, which is stored on certain websites or just simply stored on your computer, are in actuality very user friendly. Make sure your Internet browser’s operating system has updated virus and spyware protection. Firewalls are especially useful in avoiding unwanted access to your computer’s network. Site advisors can be useful when trying to detect unwanted intruders. Throughout this semester, and this blog for that matter, it has been maintained that personal information across the World Wide Web is becoming more and more available to cybercriminals. Organizations, like the U.S. Census Bureau, need to continue taking the necessary security measures to ensure identity theft does not occur. If there is one thing I have taken away from this course, it has been the need and attention one must give in securing their personal information and identity. People must have the mindset that privacy on the Internet is virtually impossible.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/28/online.security.tactics/index.html
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
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We touched on this topic very briefly today in class. Unfortunately, I think that even with the Census Bureau taking extra precautions to prevent people from falling for the hackers phishing emails, a large chunk of the population will not hesitate to give out their personal information. As we saw with several other examples, if people think its coming from a legitimate source, namely the government, they let their guard down very easily. This is especially true if they think for some reason they may be punished for not responding. I agree with Thomas, though, that if hackers found a way to access the Census Bureau's information, there'd be a serious amount of sensitive information accessed. Luckily, I think the government has this kind of security well under control, and people's main downfall in this area will be themselves. It will be interesting to see if and how this upcoming census tackles phishing security.
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