Online Records May Aid ID Theft
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Colin L. Powell's Social Security number is out there. So is Troy Aikman's.
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The theft of a laptop containing Social Security numbers of Nashville, Tennessee, area voters is expected to cost local officials about US$1 million as they roll out identity-theft protection to those affected.
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That plastic card, the one with the lousy photo that's jammed into your wallet or purse, isn't just a license to drive. It's the green light to buy a drink, the ticket to federal benefits, the must-have document to get aboard airplanes. Now it's also the flash point for an argument about how best to balance America's security needs with worries that personal privacy could be swept away.
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Identity theft concerns are pushing some counties to take down or black out personally identifiable information from their Web sites but the work remains a challenge.
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Despite the hoopla, most identity theft occurs offline. Also: Amazon uses video and GPS to create virtual tours of city businesses.... Rumors of SBC's bid to buy AT & #038;T & hellip;.  Plan to scan Arabic to preserve culture and aid intelligence & hellip;. and more.
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Leaving personal information on cell phones and computers before you sell, donate or recycle them can expose you to identity thieves. Here's how to protect yourself.
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When Michelle Brown, a corporate banker outside of Los Angeles, filled out paperwork for an apartment rental, little did she realize that financial details offered to a landlord would lead to identity theft that plagued five years of her life.
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Days after getting busted for attempting to get tech support on a printer he allegedly stole in an incident believed to have exposed the personal info of 500 driver's-license applicants, the Missouri man may have had his personal data inadvertently exposed in a data breach. Timothy Scott Short was previously a suspect in an ID-theft incident.
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A new RFID-chipped passport card that can be read up to 30 feet away -- and on which the data's not encrypted -- has drawn censure from the Centers for Democracy and Technology, which foresees covert location tracking and an increase in ID theft on the horizon. (If you filed an objection to this program already, by the way, the government says you just don't understand it.)
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Better health care and fraud protection may sound good, but are they worth the potential privacy trade-offs?
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Next Monday, researchers plan to release the first-ever analysis of U.S. Secret Service case information on identity theft.The study provides new information about the victims of ID theft as well as the criminals and the methods they use, according to Gary Gordon, executive director of Utica College&#39;s Center for Identity Management and Information Protection (CIMIP), which is writing the report.&quot;CIMIP was interested in filling gaps in the knowledge about identity theft and believed that an exploratory study of law enforcement cases with an identity theft component would provide some new information,&quot; Gordon said in an interview. This research is unique because it looks across all three aspects -- the crime, victim, and offender -- and across the lifecycle of the crime, from the time the crime was detected through arrest and the disposition of the case.&quot;This is the first time the Secret Service has permitted such a review of its closed case files, he said.The college has been working with a number of partners, including the Secret Service, IBM, and the FBI, since the Center&#39;s creation in mid-2006 to study the methods used by ID thieves and to help corporations and law enforcement prevent this type of crime.According to Javelin Strategy &amp; Research, identity theft cost U.S.businesses and consumers an estimated $49.3 billion in 2006.The study will be released Monday at a Utica-sponsored crime conference being held in McLean, Virginia. Utica College is a small private college based in Utica, New York, that offers programs in economic crime and fraud management.Historically, the Secret Service has been chartered with protecting the U.S. president and cracking down on counterfeiters, but in the 1980s its role was expanded, and it now investigates financial and identity theft crimes.Monday&#39;s study will include Secret Service data on &quot;insider threats, points of compromise, and vulnerabilities,&quot; Utica&#39;s media alert said.Representatives from the Secret Service were not immediately able to comment on the study.
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Federal regulators warn that the  Internet is the thriving frontier for identity theft, but 72  percent of the thefts of personal information for scams last  year was done offline, a new report says.
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Up to 800,000 of the school's students, faculty and alumni may be vulnerable to identity theft.  What went wrong, and what can be done about it?
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Data breaches contribute less to ID theft and fraud that most people think, according to a recent survey by Javelin Strategy & Research. Losing your checkbook or wallet is more likely to put you at risk.
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Things just aren&#39;t going well for Timothy Scott Short. Just days after a pair of tech support calls he made to printer manufacturer Digimarc&#160;resulted in his arrest, he now finds himself on the receiving end of a data breach with his Social Security number and birthdate accidentally made public via the federal court&#39;s Electronic Case Files (ECF) system.It&#39;s an ironic development, because Short, 33, was arrested in connection with the Oct. 5 theft of a Missouri Department of Revenue printer and a PC containing data on as many as 500 state residents.Short&#39;s personal information was discovered by the IDG News Service, listed on a court document called a Criminal Case Cover Sheet, which was publicly available to users of the ECF system. Normally, this document should only be accessible to those involved in the case, but it appears to have been inadvertently made public, according to a clerk with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak with the press. &quot;It&#39;s something on our side,&quot; she said, adding that technical staff is now looking into the problem.The U.S. Judicial Conference, which sets policy for U.S. courts, has said that this kind of information should be removed from publicly available electronic court records, but actually removing all the sensitive information has proved difficult.&quot;If you went online to various court systems, you could find social security numbers of many individuals,&quot; said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. &quot;It&#39;s a really, really difficult question to answer, just because you&#39;re dealing with so many jurisdictions.&quot;Social Security numbers are the building blocks of identity theft crime because they can be used to secure credit cards. &quot;Any time you are placing Social Security numbers online, your are subjecting that person to identity theft,&quot; Stephens said.With the push to make public documents available online, other government databases have had similar problems. Earlier this year, the states of California and Colorado were forced to take their Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) databases offline after privacy advocates pointed out that the Social Security numbers and other data they contained could be misused by identity thieves.Short, however, may have bigger problems to worry about. He&#39;s facing $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison on charges of possession of &quot;document-making implements&quot; in connection with the theft. He was arrested after U.S. Secret Service Special Agent John Bush recognized his voice in calls placed to a tech support line of the company that makes the stolen printer.&#160;
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Blog: Government auditors say only a fraction of the largest intrusions in recent years showed clear evidence of resulting identity theft, but they admit that's not always easy to gauge.
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Robert Vamosi talks with data loss expert Dan Geer about identity theft.