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Last week there was something called the ‘National Identity Fraud Prevention Week’ in the UK. One of the biggest goals of this themed week was to make people aware on how easy it is to get your identity stolen if you spread your personal information around you to strangers. One of the writers over at Techradar went out on the street asking people for their information to see if people would give them right away or if they actually would hesitate due to the fact he was a complete stranger.
As you may already guessed people gave their information away without a thought on why. And the most disturbing part of it all was that two minutes later (after they just gave their information) whether they would give their information up to a complete stranger most of them said no. And I think that the real problem resides just there. People know that the problem exist but they refuse to see that it might happen to them.
To steal an identity today might cause even more pain and distress then to do an actual burglary. If someone was to hijack your electronic profile they can both get you into very hard financial problems as well as destroying your social life. By spreading propaganda or other abusive information they can hurt the image of you for a very long time ahead. This is a hard fact which we can not discard. But instead of just being scared and avoid or abandon you electronic identity you can always instead do your best to keep it safe.
Just some week ago there was 10’000 user passwords that leaked from Hotmail and it was first mentioned as a security breach but later revised. As it was explained later was that the passwords had been sent by the users themselves answering a phony mail asking them to send in their passwords. Once again, most people know that they should never ever send a password to anyone asking for it – but nothing will happen to me.
Out of the 10’000 passwords leaked from Hotmail-users the most used password was ‘123456’. Second most used was ‘123456789’. If you have anyone of these as a password to anything at all, you better go and change it right now. Choose passwords which you can remember and try to make them more complex then just numbers or just letters. Use the opportunity to be creative!
And while your at it, never use the same password for everything you can find. It is even better to keep different passwords and storing them in a log at home or somewhere you feel is ‘safe’ if you were to forget any passwords.
Resources:
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/caught-on-video-brits-handing-their-identities-to-complete-strangers-643548?src=rss&attr=all
http://www.acunetix.com/blog/websecuritynews/statistics-from-10000-leaked-hotmail-passwords/
http://www.stop-idfraud.co.uk/