by Joshua Mccracken

Created on: May 28, 2009

Identity theft is a common crime these days and most of the problem is perpetuated by the way we don't store our most important personal and financial data properly. This is entirely preventable if you adhere to some common sense safety practices.

There is a very common misconception that network security is all about passwords these days when it really couldn't be further than the truth. Largely gone are the days when a network could be compromised by insecure or default passwords. Sure, there are computers out there that fall victim to brute force password cracking but most computers are actually being compromised by buffer overflows and other bugs present in software running with root-level, or administrator privileges. This is extremely common on computers running the Windows operating system which make up the vast majority of the internet. Internet worms autospread by automatically exploiting the most common of these vulnerabilities, breaking into computers and transmitting themselves to new hosts and autoexecuting. These worms typically form large networks of computers called botnets. They are controlled remotely frequently by script kiddies but occasionally an actual computer hacker, who is able to retrieve passwords stored in your browser, the name of every website you visit and every single key you press in real time either over a system called IRC, or through a remote server, or by using a decentralized network such as gnutella to camouflage communications. Even worse, these criminals use techniques such as process injection to inject the malware into windows explorer, common web browsers, or svchost in order to evade firewalls and avoid being visible in the task manager to more savvy users. They may also employ rootkits to achieve this, by dropping some specially written drivers and hooking them to the kernel and filtering communications between the user and the operating system and/or the operating system and the network and/or the operating system and applications running on it. They can even prevent all of their suspicious traffic to irc servers and/or other compromised hosts from being sniffed and detected unless the sniffing is being done from a clean computer that is on the same network.

Malware and hacking are the leading causes of identity theft today. Thieves run forums openly selling stolen financial information for a clean profit using services such as e-gold to launder their money. Not only do they employ buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities

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