Identity Theft by Computer
Since computers first began to be used for handling financial information, they have been used for theft. However, as long as they were primarily the big mainframes used by the banks, prevention was mostly a matter of banks being careful who was allowed into their computer rooms. If embezzlement occurred, it was a matter of closely examining the lives of each of the few people who had access to those big mainframes. But as computers have become ubiquitous parts of everybody's lives, everyone has to be aware of the dangers of exposing one's personal information to thieves on the computer.
Most obviously, people are careless about how they create passwords. They use obvious ones like their names or birthdays, or their pet's name. Or if they're assigned one they find too difficult to remember, they write it down and stick it next to their computer. If the computer is in an office or otherwise accessible to the public, it becomes easy to use that slip of paper to break into those accounts.
If you allow your computer to store your login information for you, particularly for websites such as banks and credit cards that have sensitive financial information, you are in danger. Even your browsing history could be misused if someone were to get into your computer while it is connected to the Internet. One of the most common methods of doing this is to trick the user into installing a piece of software known as a keylogger. Once it installs itself, it transmits a record of all your keypresses to its masters, who can then use it to determine your login information and compromise all those accounts.
If you do a lot of online transactions, you will want to be careful about security, and not just in the obvious places. Although most people are careful about making sure they have a secure connection when they are using the websites of their bank or credit card companies, or when paying for something online, whether it be a purchase or their utility bills, a lot of people are careless about other kinds of information. They will fill out a form to win a prize without even looking at whether it is secure, although it may be requesting sensitive non-financial information that an identity thief can use to obtain documents that can allow them to masquerade as their mark.
College students and new graduates are at particular risk, simply because they make so many online transactions. While they are in college, they will access their grade reports and even financial aid information without being careful that they have a secure connection. Once they begin looking for a job, they'll transmit sensitive personal information to prospective employers without considering that potential identity thieves could be spying upon them. Worse, many of them are careless about just how much information they share on social networking sites such as Facebook.
Even after you are done with a computer and are getting rid of it, you need to be mindful of the risks it can pose to the security of your personal information. Even if you put all your documents in the trash (recycle bin for Windows people), the hard drive is probably full of bookmarks, cookies, and other bits of information. Not to mention that a sufficiently skilled person can unerase documents after you have discarded them. To make sure nobody can get your personal information off any computer you donate or discard, you will want to make sure that you erase the entire hard disk and reformat it. You can buy special secure erase programs that will overwrite the entire disk with a series of 0's and then 1's before reformatting it, making it almost completely impossible to recover any information. If you're truly worried about the possibility of traces of useful data remaining as a result of drive head drift, you may want to remove the hard drive and physically render it inoperable before getting rid of the computer.
Although your personal computer can be a gateway by which identity thieves can break into your life and make a mess, it doesn't have to be. By taking some simple precautions, you can reduce your risk considerably.
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