Thought About Protecting Your Information?
By ChaChanna Simpson
In this new technological age, it is very easy to get scammed. You could lose your identity or get charged for items you didn’t purchase or services you didn’t use. And if it hasn’t happened to you, then I know you know someone it has happened to. I want to alert you to some of the areas where you may be vulnerable to getting scammed. To help me out, I turned to Sean Mehner, President of Connecticut Information Security, LLC, a computer security company, who also graduated with me from Stamford High School. Shout out to class of 1996! Back to the serious stuff.
Calling toll-free
For those of you who have your own toll-free number, whether for personal or business reasons, be aware that if you have an extension number, someone can hack into your system and reprogram your extension number to forward it to any number they want, without paying for it. So instead of calling your 800 number and dialing your extension to get connected to you, they are connecting to long lost cousins in Brazil. And you wouldn’t have a clue until the bill came. This type of crime is happening with the VOIP numbers. On the black market, this is selling more than credit card numbers and is growing.
Wireless connection
How many of you have a wireless headset for your cell phone? There is a chance it could be hacked into. “Because all those devices have the same pin code, 0000 or 4444, unless you change it, and people rarely do that, someone else can pair up with your phone and pull your contacts, messages and make phone calls from your phone, depending on the functionality,” says Mehner.
If you are using Wi-Fi and are not locking it up, you could be asking for trouble. “If someone broke into your computer they could start sending spam, downloading porn or some other illegal activity using your computer as a host server. And it gets traced back to your computer, you’d have a hard time trying to prove it wasn’t you,” says Mehner.
An army of viruses
I’ve always been curious about hackers who send viruses to a computer or servers at companies and what the purpose of that was and Mehner was kind enough to break it down for me.
“So when a hacker amasses a collection of infected hosts he has what is called a BotNet. They can then point this 'army' of hosts to attack a specific online entity such as an ecommerce site. If they have enough of these hosts, they will render the victim unable to serve legitimate traffic resulting in what is called a DoS (Denial of Service). If an online company has no brick and mortar store being offline can be disastrous to them. Knowing this the attacker will then contact the victim, and force them to pay in order to have the attacks stopped. This was popular with casino sites for quite some time.
BotNet's can also be rented, if you will, from the criminal's that build them. This is done for any reason you can think of. Some examples might be to put a competitor offline during an event that could result in large financial gains for another company such as a shopping site during the holidays. This can also have a significant impact on reputations and customer trust.
Another technique that is gaining popularity amongst the criminal scene is using infected hosts to steal personal information. This can be financial data, passwords, accounts, VOIP information etc. A lot of these hosts are obtained through the high availability and implicit trust in Web 2.0 sites such as Myspace and Facebook.”
Passwords everyone knows
You know how sometimes you forget your password and then you have to go through the special questions you selected to reset your password such as your mother’s maiden name, what high school you graduated from, where were you born, etc? Well, did you ever think that all anyone has to do to find out those answers is view your Facebook or Myspace page? I didn’t think of this either but I read about it on MSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles.
Mehner says, “Bottom line, criminals are trying to infect your machines to steal your personal data as well as attack others. A primary source of these infections lately has been through infected web sites, with a high percentage of these being in the social networking arena,” adding, “Some easy ways to protect yourself is always run the latest software patches for any products on a machine. Personal firewalls such as the Comodo or Zone Alarm are excellent and free, and be sure that anti-virus is installed and up to date.”
So now that you are well informed, I have one question for you: When are you going to update your virus protection software?
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