Published: May 07, 2011Tags: data breaches, Defcon, smartphone, Social Engineering
1. Data Breaches: Businesses suffer most often from data breaches, making up 35% of total breaches. Medical and healthcare services are also frequent targets, accounting for 29.1% of breaches. Government and military make up 16.2%, banking, credit, and financial services account for 10.5%, and 9.2% of breaches occur in educational institutes.
Even if you protect your PC and keep your critical security patches and antivirus definitions updated, there is always the possibility that your bank or credit card company may be hacked, and your sensitive data sold for the purposes of identity theft.
2. Social Engineering: This is the act of manipulating people into taking certain actions or disclosing sensitive information. It’s essentially a fancier, more technical form of lying.
At 2010’s Defcon, a game was played in which contestants used the telephone to convince company employees to voluntarily cough up information they probably shouldn’t have. Of 135
It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, rich or poor, if you have good credit or bad credit, pay with cash or credit card, whether or not you use the Internet, or even own a computer. You can be a maintenance worker or a scientist. It doesn’t matter.
Whether you are alive or even if you are dead, as long as you have a Social Security number, you are a potential identity theft victim.
Reporters tend to be fairly savvy and well informed. Identity theft, however, is a complicated issue, and anyone can be stumped, regardless of your level of security intelligence.
One reporter received an alert about “irregular check card activity.” It was sent late one weeknight, and she didn’t see the email until the following night. At first, she couldn’t believe her bank account could have been compromised, and suspected it was a phishing email designed to trick her into disclosing her account information. But when sh
An ex-con picked the wrong home to invade.
Imagine you’re in bed counting sheep dreaming of clouds and flying unicorns. Suddenly there is a knock on the door, which is startling to most people who wake up to the presence of noise and especially that of a knock at 3am.
In your discombobulated state you shuffle over to the door and open it to see who it is, they give you some song and dance and you open the door. Next, a hand wrapped over your face nose and mouth.
In my world this would never happen as previously described. In my world when the door is knocked on or the bell is rung a ferocious toothy German shepherd would lose her mind trying to get through the door, while I’m looking at my security cameras to see who is at the front door. At the same time I’m accessing an intercom to begin dialog all the while ready to press a panic button on my home security alarm.
If the person at the door is in uniform I’m calling the police to determine if they are supposed to be there. If the p
If there were a criminal hall of fame with an award for the coolest criminal, it would have to go to the pickpocket. Pickpockets are sneaky creatures who manage to function exactly one degree below the radar.
Pickpockets whisper through society, undetected and undeterred. They are subtle and brazen at the same time. They are like bed bugs, crawling on you and injecting numbing venom that prevents you from detecting their bite until it’s much too late. They aren’t violent like a drug-crazed mugger, or confrontational like a stick-up robber. They have more gumption than criminal hackers, since they don’t hide behind the anonymity of the Internet.
NPR reports that nowadays, picking pockets has become a rare and increasingly difficult crime, thanks to “stepped-up surveillance in most public places,” the dismantling of systems of apprenticeship, heftier sentences, and the widespread use of debit cards.
One pickpocket is quoted as saying, “When people stopped carrying money, that was the beginning of the end of pickpocketing…Pickpockets have no respect for thugs or robbers. We consider t