by Ben Tasker

Created on: November 08, 2008   Last Updated: November 27, 2008

Password theft is a fast growing business, in the age of the internet a singular word or phrase is often all you need to verify your identity. Unfortunately this token is all that is needed for someone else to adopt your identity, and potentially commit fraud or criminal acts in your name.

Everything seems to be online in this day and age, whether it's your bank, your mail or your shopping. Each of these require a unique login to identify you. Unfortunately usernames can be quite easy to come by, in fact on many sites your username is public (Ebay is a good example of this).

So how do you protect yourself from this threat? Generally it simply requires a little bit of common sense. You wouldn't provide just anyone with a copy of the key to your house, so why do the same for your online persona?

You may, on occasion, receive emails from your Bank, or from PayPal, notifiying you that they are undergoing a security re-vamp and need you to verify your identity. You are usually give a link to open a page requesting your password. If you receive one of these, apply a little bit of common sense and ask yourself exactly why the bank would want this. Check the sender details in the email (though these can be faked, so beware)and contact the supposed sender to verify the legitimacy of the email.

Most Financial Institutions make it clear that they will never ask you to enter your passcode/phrase in whole, and certainly never by email. Yet many people still fall for these scams. One common reason for people clicking these links in emails is that it appears to link to the website you would expect. However in a HTML email it is all too easy to create a link that appears to point to www.barclays.com but will actually open www.gimmeyourdetails.com.

Banks aren't the only organisations targetted for password fraud, everything from E-mail to Facebook accounts seems to get targetted. There are a variety of reasons for this, the first being that it is not always your money that is being targetted. Your account may be required to put a line of anonymity between you and the fraudster, this makes the fraudster harder to track, and puts you in the frame.

Another reason for seeking out the login details of supposedly harmless accounts (let's for example assume Facebook), is that many people use the same password for all their accounts. So if I establish that you registered for Facebook with the email address myemail@easytarget.com, using the password 'sekretpassc0de' then the odds are that

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>