As my dad has just had some purchases made on his credit card that weren’t his, and one of his employees just had his identity stolen, Internet privacy is definitely something that is on my mind. Neither my dad nor his employee Mike have any idea of how their information was stolen, a fact, that is quite troubling. A very possible answer is that they had their information copied via the Internet.

While browsing the Internet, I found that identity theft is increasing every year, and in 2008 over 10 million people were affected. Credit card fraud is the largest type of identity theft, taking up 26% of identity theft. As identity theft is increasingly becoming more popular, people have to be more weary when using the Internet. As of 2009, the top ten security threats on the Internet according to TechRepublic were:

1. Social Networking As an Avenue of Attack

2. More Attacks on the Integrity of the Data

3. Attacks on mobile Devices

4. Virtualization

5. Cloud Computing

6. More Target Attacks on Non-Windows Operating Systems

7. Third-Party Applications

8. Side Effects of Green Computing

9. IP Convergence

10. Overconfidence

Out of these ten, I found number six to be the most frightening, as just buying my first Mac, I thought that I didn’t have to worry about viruses or being hacked, but apparently it is supposed to very easy to be hack into them. According to SPENDONLIFE.com, the reason why PCs get the most press for being attacked is that,

“Just as terrorists prefer to attack large gatherings of people where they can do the most damage, so do hackers prefer to write malware that will spread to the greatest number of computers — and that means Windows.”

Does this mean that I have to buy security for my computer?

If you unfortunately do find yourself a victim of identity theft like my father and Mike, there are four vital steps the Federal Trade Commission suggests that you take:

1. Place a fraud alert on your credit reports, and review your reports

2. Close the accounts that you know, or believe, have been tampered with or opened fraudulently

3. File a report with your local police or the police in the community where the identity theft took place

4. File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission

Electronic trading and Hackers

Last week in class we discussed the electronic trading of money. This also has been expanding and is to the point where we can now do all of our banking online. Some banks don't even have a physical building, it's all just done over the Internet. We can purchase items over the internet with our credit cards and do all transactions within seconds. Most companies have a 'shopping cart' where you can gather all of your items and save them until you want to check out just like you were at the store.

It's astonishing how we can do most things online from our home without even going anywhere to purchase them. They will be delivered straight to your home usually within a week or so. We are able to make payments on our credit cards through our banking company or credit union just by entering our account number and routing number. However, when making transactions or purchases, we have to be careful about all the hackers that are out there and make sure our information is not being stolen from us. There are many ways that hackers can get to all of your personal information such as spoofing, backdoors or trojan horses and many more. Trojan Horse's are one of the more common ones. This is when someone creates a program that the user cannot see and instructs them to exploit some of their software along with private information.

We've come really far when it comes to the internet and electronic trading of money. The fact is, that there are people out there who have grown with the technology as well and are using their knowledge to create harm and do damage. People can get your personal information and do pretty much whatever they want with it once they have your identity. It's something we all need to be aware of and be careful when doing online banking or making purchases. Just be smart on the internet.