Date: Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Keeping your identity safe on the web

Recent reports have shown that over 80 000 people in the UK suffered from identity fraud last year alone, at a cost of £1.5 billion to the economy. Now new questions are being raised as to how we can protect our identity from being stolen online. The rise in popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace, and Bebo have raised fears that people are exposing too many of their personal details online for fraudsters to access. With the false notion that only their friends can see their personal data people are increasingly including large amounts of personal data on their profile pages, such as their email address, location, marital status and occupation, as well as often the names of their children and pets which are frequently used as passwords. Experts are warning that with all this personal information others could easily use people’s data to open bank accounts, mortgages, and take out loans in their name. This is leading to advice from the professionals, such as credit information company Equifax, to users to limit the amount of identifying information people include in these social networking websites. Further caution has been raised by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) who carried out a security test on the new iPhone . They have claimed that the new hotly-anticipated gadget can in fact be hacked in to easily by using a rogue wi-fi port, or by forcing the phone to connect to the internet through a certain website, thus allowing fraudsters full access to the phone’s address book, texts and voicemail. This has led to Dr Miller who carried out the experiment warning users to only use wi-fi connections they trust and never to open website links in emails, even if it’s from someone they know. All these measures will hopefully combat the rise in identity fraud which has swept the country.

Sources: Times Online, BBC News