I am one of the advocates of twitter, linkedin and to a certain degree facebook, with the meteoric rise in social media use comes a whole new opportunity for identity thieves.
“Social media identity theft happens when someone hacks an account via phishing, creates infected short URLs or creates a page using photos and the victims identifying information” explains Siciliano. The Identity Theft Expert.
His prediction for 2010 is that the increase in social networking activity, along with a user’s failure to implement security and privacy settings and protocols, will lead to an increased exposure of not only the user’s personal information but possibly that of their “friends”.
Quite simply, all the experts are saying there will be an increase in identity theft crimes and the number of victims unless significant changes are made in information security. “Our most important asset is our identity. And we are functioning under a completely antiquated system of identification with wide open credit and few safeguards to protect the consumer. ” according to Siciliano.
Companies now need to invest in identity theft protection and prevention as part of their online/ mobile security.
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Nice !!!!
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