by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: July 20, 2010

Name the vulnerability and thieves will use it to steal access to their electronically stored funds or to pose as their victims when they establish credit using purloined credentials.

Imagine a thief who hangs out in a supermarket, looking for the most harried and ditzy shopper. That individual falls in line behind the shopper, watching as the ATM card is used and as the PIN is entered. "Somehow", the card falls to the floor and the helpful thief picks up the card and hands it back to the distracted customer. Only it is another card that looks the same. Now the thief has the card and the PIN. The bank only wants the card and the PIN, making the thief identical to the true owner of the card. Expand the list to those who have access to security camera records of a person as they are entering their PIN.

Imagine the waiter or waitress who records a diner's credit card information. This has happened many a time as food service personnel have used the data to go shopping or to establish credit at a customer's expense.

Imagine the little liquor store that has the off-brand but convienient credit and ATM card machine...which records all of the card's information that will be used later to completely rip of the identity of the customer and to use it to buy things or to get cash.

There are far too many ways in which family members, friends and even close neighbors can gain access to a person's social security card, bills, and other identity documents and create a new identity for themselves. A trusting or negligent individual can leave enough of their identity lying around for a person to create a whole new persona.

In more sophisticated operations, "social engineers" can befriend a person who has access to business or corporate identity documents and then use the information to fool the corporate computer databases into believing that they are a legitimate employee who is authorized to manage information or to perform transactions. Even a good high school prankster can get access to the schools databases and have a good time.

In social networking, group forums and at other sites, many gullible people give up their password to another person, creating many situations where someone wreaks havoc under the identity of another individual.

And we do not need to confine the understanding of "identity theft" to financial, site authority, computer access or credit arenas. There are now ways to create convincing, yet forged documents or to photo shop people's faces into compromising and even horrible scenarios, where only close and sophisticated examination can exonerate them. But by the time that the photo or document is proved to be faked or forged, the damage is done to the person's reputation and standing.

Finally, it is more than likely that hackers are working on ways to break encryption or to capture data that is being transmitted by wireless means. The laws of many countries do not allow the average user to have encryption that exceeds the capability of government to capture and extract every bit of data.

 When we view our activities as being a major part of our identities, then it is easy to see how the increased data capture of everything that we do is also a form of identity theft or procurement.

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