Data In, Data Out

Identify Theft - Two ways to protect yourself on the internet
by Luis Eguiluz

Identity theft has now become one of the most important issues currently facing the World Wide Web and those who manage it and ensure its security.

From theft of Social Security numbers to Credit Cards, unscrupulous individuals have various ways of stealing your identity.  Even if you think you are safe, you may not be. Why? Because the second your computer is plugged into the internet, you are no longer 100% secure.

So, what can you do to minimize the possibility of becoming an identity theft statistic?

Be careful with what you Email

Never send any confidential or personal information via email, whether it's a credit card, social security or bank number, email by its very nature IS NOT SECURE! Why you may ask? Well, let us learn how email actually works.
 
How email works: Imagine that you have a document you need mailed out. Now imagine that before it gets mailed out, you take the document and shred it into hundreds of small pieces. Then you take all these pieces and put them into separate envelopes. You then write the exact same destination on all the envelopes and drop them off at various mail boxes around town. The intended recipient waits to get all the pieces of the documents, and then he\she proceeds to re-construct the original document. This is how email works.
 
When you send an email (the document), it is broken up into small pieces of computer code (the shredded document) and sent throughout the world wide web (mailed out). All these small messages go through various locations (different mail boxes) until they all reach the desired destination (the recipient), at which time the recipient (the computer getting the email) reconstructs the original email from all these small messages that were sent out.
 

 
So how does this affect the security of your email? Well, just like the FBI can take shredded documents and put them back together, hackers, spammers and identity-thieves have specialized tools (software) that can put some, most or all of the pieces of your email back together again.
 

 
So next time you need to divulge sensitive information, it's better to pick up the phone and call rather than sending it via email.
 
As a side note, there are ways to ensure your email is secure by using encryption, but only your network specialist can provide you with that information. So unless you know, for a fact, that your email is encrypted, it's better to err on the side of caution and never send sensitive information via email.

Watch for the Yellow Lock!

Sooner or later you will have to purchase a product/service on-line or may want to access your bank account on-line. One thing you must remember is that just like email, the internet, by default, is NOT secured!
 
So how can you minimize the chances of the information falling into the wrong hands? You do so by looking for the yellow lock.
 
If you are in a webpage where you need to provide sensitive information, make sure that you see a yellow lock at the bottom-right hand corner of your web browser (see below).
 

 
The yellow lock means that the page is using bank-level encryption, known as 128-bit encryption, so the data that will be sent from your computer to the location requesting the information will be encrypted.
 
Remember the following:
 
a). Just because one page of a website has a yellow lock, which means its secure, does not mean the other pages of the site are secure as well. If there is NO yellow lock, then the page you are in is NOT secure.
 
b) Some sites state on the page that the page you are in is secure, but remember, anyone can write anything on a web page. So if you don't see the yellow lock, then the page is NOT secure, no matter what is written on the webpage.

So remember next time you need to provide personal information, remember that email as well as a webpage without the yellow lock are NOT secure. If you always remember this, the chances of you becoming a statistic is greatly reduced.