IDENTITY THEFT! ARE YOU SAFE?

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We’ve all seen the commercials of the people sitting around their house, dancing around a pickup truck or out shopping…with the dubbed in voices speaking to you about how they bought this that and the other and saying, “What difference does it make, it’s not my money!” We all laugh at these things but fail to realize that this could be one of us. Here is some info that should ease your mind a little about doing business online.

Incidences of online identity theft have steadily climbed in recent months to almost epidemic proportions. Banks and online retailers have struggled to stay on top of the problem and to protect their customers, whose personal financial information and online account details are coveted by criminals. But technology companies…both large and small…are bringing products and services to market that they claim can end, or greatly reduce, the threat of online identity theft.

Some of those technologies that lay claim to such remedies are:

1. Antiphising Toolbars: These lightweight applications, or applets, were some of the first tools specifically created to stop online scams like phishing. These free programs have been offered to customers by EBay, Earthlink, America Online, and other companies.

2. Antiphishing services: Phishing prevention services are designed to spot and thwart new threats, including brand monitoring services such as FraudProtect by MarkMonitor, Symantec's Online Fraud Management Solution, VeriSign's AntiPhishing Solution, and services by NameProtect. Most of these services use a network of sensors to monitor e-mail traffic, news groups, and Web domain registrations, spotting new scams, such as phishing attacks. The services promise to enable companies to move quickly to crack down on fraudulent Web sites that use their names and also give customers advanced warning about scam e-mail messages making the rounds.

3. Payer authentication and smart cards: Online security advocates often cite smart cards as a cure-all for online fraud. The cards combine traditional plastic credit cards with microprocessor chips that can store far more information about the cardholder than older, magnetic-strip cards could. Among other things, smart cards can store PINs or biometric identifiers that could be used at the point of purchase to verify the purchaser's identity, making theft of an account number or credit card a waste of time. Smart cards are omnipresent in Europe, and the U.K. banking industry has launched a major, nationwide rollout of smart card technology through its "Chip and PIN" program, which will replace magnetic-strip cards and do away with signed receipts for "card present" purchases. But banking officials in the U.S. cite a number of obstacles to widespread smart card use, including an existing infrastructure of millions of card readers that do not support the new cards. Sounds like the U.S. needs to get with the times.

4. Fraud screening and prevention: Lacking strong authentication at the point of purchase, most credit card companies and merchants in the U.S. name fraud screening technology as their first and best defense against fraud. Companies in this space, including VeriSign, ClearCommerce, and CyberSource, use a variety of filters to analyze transaction patterns for individual consumers or groups of consumers, and to spot suspicious activity. For example, many companies today are flagging patterns of rapid, high-value transactions and spot discrepancies between the geographical location from which the order was placed and the billing address, or look suspiciously at transactions with different billing and ship-to addresses.

5. Consumer authentication services: Recent deals between security technology companies and major ISPs and consumer software vendors could bring multifactor authentication technology into the mainstream. In September, RSA Security and AOL announced a new program called "AOL PassCode" that will encourage AOL customers to use RSA SecurID tokens to protect account information. On the same day, VeriSign announced its Unified Authentication program, which it said will reduce the cost of "strong authentication," such as one-time passwords or hardware smart cards. In October, RSA announced the availability of SecurID for Windows, a secure token that will make it easier for users to log on and off to Windows machines using multifactor authentication, while VeriSign and AOL said they would investigate ways to extend the Unified Authentication program to AOL members. Experts agree that the sum of those announcements is more and less expensive access to strong authentication technology--AOL's Passcode token costs only $9.95. For now, Passcode and SecurID for Windows haven't been expanded to protect access to online banking or e-commerce services, such as Apple Computer's popular ITunes, with which AOL has a relationship through its AOL Music service. We will just have to see what the future holds for us in the years to come.

Speedy’s word of advice to you and your family…if you do business online…make sure that the webpage you are on at the time you are provided personal information such as social security numbers, account information, credit card numbers, etc. are protected by some form of security device that limits, if not eliminates, any chance of someone intercepting your information and stealing your identity.

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