ID Theft: Where you live makes a difference, study finds
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New York, California, Nevada and Arizona are among the riskiest U.S. states for ID theft, while Wyoming, Vermont, Montana and North Dakota are among the safest, according to a study by ID Analytics Inc.
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State officials warned California residents Wednesday to take preventative steps against ID theft after an unknown hacker gained access to a database at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Little by little, a weapon against identity theft is gaining currency - but few people in the United States know about it. It's called the security freeze, and it lets individuals block access to their credit reports.
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The theft of a laptop containing Social Security numbers of Nashville, Tenn.-area voters is expected to cost local officials about $1 million as they roll out identity-theft protection to those affected.County officials say that thieves broke into Davidson County Election Commission offices on the weekend before Christmas, smashing a window with a rock and then making off with a $3,000 router, a digital camera, and a pair of Dell Latitude laptops containing names and Social Security numbers of all 337,000 registered voters in the county.County election officials began notifying residents of the breach on Jan. 2, and the local government is offering victims one year of free identity theft protection from Debix Identity Protection Network.Debix says that 25 to 35 percent of victims of this type of breach typically request this service. With the city paying Debix just under $10 per account, the price tag for the laptop theft is expected to be in the $1 million range.Since state data breach disclosure laws went into effect a few years ago, the theft of an unencrypted laptop computer can become a major problem for any organization that stores sensitive data.&quot;It is a very bad information-handling practice to keep sensitive information about individuals including their Social Security numbers on an unencrypted laptop or any other device that is removable,&quot; said Paul Stephens director of policy and advocacy with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a privacy advocacy group that has tracked the exposure of 217 million records in the United States over the past three years.Laptop thefts have been the source of privacy breaches at AT&amp;T,&#160;The Gap, and the Chicago Public School system recently.The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County&#39;s IT services department is now working with the Commission to make changes to protect residents from this type of incident and has already come up with 19 recommendations, said Janel Lacy, a spokeswoman for Nashville Mayor Karl Dean.
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(InfoWorld) - Despite widespread media coverage of data breaches over the past year, identity fraud is actually dropping in the U.S., Javelin Strategy & Research Inc. reported Thursday. In fact, the cost of identity fraud was down 12 percent from Javelin's 2006 survey, at an estimated US$49.3 billion in losses. The number one source of ID fraud? A lost or stolen credit card. "ID fraud is down," said James VanDyke, Javelin's president and founder. "It hasn't been growing for several years, but we hadn't seen it drop." Nationwide, there were about 500,000 fewer victims, according to this year's survey, VanDyke said. Much of the drop can be attributed to improved antifraud practices on the part of consumers and businesses, he said. "Businesses are doing a better job of not granting new accounts [to criminals]," he said. And consumers are also monitoring their account activity more closely and reporting suspicious transactions to the banks much more quickly. Javelin based its findings on 5,000 telephone interviews with U.S residents conducted over three weeks last October. The survey follows a methodology established by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which released a similar study back in 2003. The Javelin research was sponsored by CheckFree Corp., Visa USA Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. The survey's findings are at odds with those of research firm Gartner Inc., which has reported that ID theft is on the rise. But VanDyke says that this is because Javelin's numbers include responses from a wider range of people, including those who lack Internet access. "Thirty percent of people in the U.S. are not on the Internet, and those people have a vastly different way of managing their finances," he said. According to Javelin, there are also important differences between the way rich and poor people react to ID theft, something that VanDyke describes as a "fraud detection digital divide." "The low-income people essentially run away from purchases and they run away from the Internet," Van Dyke said. Affluent people, on the other hand, tend to embrace the Internet as a way to avoid having sensitive data stolen from the mail, and to keep tabs on their account activity, he said. Mail theft accounted for about 9 percent of all ID compromises. That's more victims than data breaches and phishing combined, according to Javelin's numbers. Javelin also found that young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were at greater risk of ID theft, with more than 5 percent of respondents having been victimized. "They're being haphazard and as a result, they're being victimized," VanDyke said. "They're not protecting their PCs with antivirus software and firewalls.
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(InfoWorld) - Identity theft remained top of mind among U.S. consumers last year, but complaints about Internet auction fraud dropped noticeably, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). More than a quarter of a million ID theft complaints were lodged with the agency last year, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,000 complaints the FTC received. That number is down slightly from 2005, when ID theft accounted for 37 percent of all complaints. This marks the seventh consecutive year that identity theft has been ranked number one. The second-largest number of complaints, 7 percent, came from consumers who were unhappy with products they had ordered from catalogs. Internet-related complaints were up too. According to the 2006 data, they made up 60 percent of all fraud complaints. Last year, they accounted for 46 percent. But one area of Internet fraud declined noticeably: Internet auctions. In last year's report, complaints relating to products purchased on online auction sites like eBay made up 12 percent of the FTC submissions. In the 2006 numbers released Wednesday, that number had plummeted to 5 percent. The FTC has made identity theft a priority over the past few years, and the agency maintains a Web site where consumers can learn how to protect themselves and file complaints if they've been victimized. The FTC is also one of the agencies heading up the U.S. government's Identity Theft Task Force, created by President George Bush in 2006. "It's not surprising to me that identity theft is number one because we're the ID theft clearinghouse," said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. The fact that the FTC saw a slight drop in the percentage of its complaints that related to ID fraud appears to back upÂ a downward trend reported last week by Javelin Research. The research firm said that ID fraud was down in the U.S. with the cost of this type of crime dropping 12 percent in 2006. The FTC stressed that its consumer complaints data is merely anecdotal. However, the agency is working on a more rigorous study of identity fraud trends and is expected to release that data in the coming months. Majoras said it was unclear whether ID fraud is increasing but hopes that the Javelin numbers are right. Her sister was the victim of identity theft recently after falling prey to a phishing attack, she said. "I said to her, 'You can't fall for stuff like that,'" she said. Â
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Despite growing fears about online fraud, a new study finds that most cases of identity theft originate offline.
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LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Consumers are doing a better job of guarding against identity thieves, yet most still give out too many personal details, making themselves vulnerable to becoming one of the millions of victims each year, according to a survey
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Identity theft victims are also losing more money and getting less of it back, research shows.
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Rise in online identity fraud has companies on the hook: Educate customers or lose them.
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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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Identity thieves can snare Social Security numbers from a potpourri of public records, especially those maintained by state and local governments, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
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The DHS defends its right to search and seize travelers' possessions, electronics, and digital information at the border. International travelers may want to leave their personal information at home.
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Increasing concerns about identity theft are driving a growing number of counties to start redacting personal data from public records on their Web sites. But the work remains challenging.
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Attorney Eric J. Sinrod finds that the facts belie the general belief that ID theft is rampant. Still, victory is a way off.
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As RFID-chipped passports gain adoption around the world, successful attempts to crack them are on the rise as well. Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have already reported compromised data, while countries such as New Zealand remain sure it can't happen there. But what if the goal wasn't data theft but detonation?
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One of the most common forms of identity theft involves illegal immigrants using fraudulent Social Security numbers.