Total Identity Protection

While many cyber cafes — especially in Brooklyn — have become a key destination for the young, hip and creative, in developing countries they are the breeding ground for international cyber crime. Since anyone can walk into these Internet parlors and begin a hacking rampage often aimed at U.S. interests, it’s the ideal place for the shady and nefarious.

Well, Nepal is taking some very simple, yet innovative steps that may help fight the scourge that is international cyber crime. In Nepal’s biggest metropolitan city, Kathmandu, cyber cafes are now required to ID customers. Users will have to provide personal information, such as names, addresses, phone numbers and signatures.

And it seems to be working. According to the Himalayan Times, police units have already recorded 13 cases of cyber crime, with nine being resolved and four still under investigation.

While this may be a very tactical approach to fighting cyber crime, just think how effective this could be if other nations like Russia and China did this?

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Officials from the University of Tennessee Medical Center are notifying approximately 8,000 patients that the facility did not properly dispose of hospital reports.   The personal information poses potential risk of a privacy data breach, according to a Knoxville News report.  

In October, the hospital was notified that records containing private patient information were disposed without proper shredding and were instead discarded in the hospital’s waste stream.

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The Christmas shopping season traditionally kicks off on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. This also begins a time when criminals swarm the shopping malls as well as the Internet, seeking to take advantage of holiday opportunities.

When shopping in stores, keep the following in mind:

Employees: Seasonal employees are more likely to steal, from their employer and from the customers. It has been said that only 10% of employees are honest, 10% of employees will always steal and 80% will steal based on circumstances. So always count your change.

Credit Card Skimming: When a salesperson or waiter takes your credit card, they can run it through a card reader device that will copy the information stored on the magnetic strip. So when you hand over your card, watch closely to see where it is taken and what is done with it. It’s normal for the card to be swiped through a point of sale terminal or keyboard card reader.

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Every so often, we like to do a “Friday’s Food for Thought” post that showcases the entertaining, sublime and down-right funny. While we completely acknowledge that identity theft is not a laughing matter, songs and other popular culture snippet about identity theft can create more awareness about this issue. And, of course, we are not going to feature those so-called funny ads that offer free credit reporting. Do you remember our post featuring the FTC’s spoof videos on these TV advertisements? Yes, that was funny. Well, today, we have are featuring two video clips for your entertainment. One is more of an audio clip of hipster cabaret singer Nelly McKay’s 2008 song called “Identity Theft.” And the second is a “Funny or Die” video that features a guy singing about identity theft. Read more…

Q: I am a Carbonite customer, and can’t remember if the backup process is automatic or if I need to initiate the process to backup files.

A: The Carbonite backup process is automatic (at least by default). And it’s pretty quiet too, which may be why you haven’t noticed it working in the background. However, you do want to be sure that everything’s connecting and backing up as it should. There’s a great entry in Carbonite’s own support section that will help you see what’s been backed up when, for the PC and for the Mac.

Most major websites now install cookies on your computer, which track what you do online. Over time, these cookies develop a profile, which becomes your digital fingerprint, to a certain extent. You may have noticed after searching for a specific product, advertisements for that particular product or brand appearing on various other websites you visit.

The New York Times reports , “advertisers are increasingly using powerful software known as supercookies, such as so-called Flash and document object management (or DOM) cookies, which can hold more information, and Web bugs or beacons, which let sites record statistics like what ads attracted you to the site and whether you bought something. They are not removed when you clear out your cookies.”

The “harm” done here is less damaging than it is invasive. Meaning I don’t see any physical harm or identity theft ever happening as a result of this refined marketing.

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