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The security precaution of shredding mail and personal documents is very important in these trying times. Besides keeping private personals away from the prying eyes of family, close friends, or relatives, obliterating documentation is the only way to prevent data mining by people you do not even know.

Criminal hackers (crackers), burglars, and identity thieves have no compunction about diving in dumpsters or trash cans to build profiles on potential targets. The federal government calls it "trash intelligence" or TRASHINT. Even law enforcement has been known to use this technique to build evidence related to its active cases.

Crackers are looking for private information from which they can build a detailed personal profile to sell or exploit both online and off. The targeted information is online computer accounts for billing and credit services, birth dates, full names, social security numbers, bank receipts, old canceled checks, etc. Basically any personal document is vulnerable to data mining techniques.

Offline, crackers will emulate the behaviors of burglars and identity thieves to obtain this information. Besides going through discarded trash, they will use social engineering to gain the confidence of targets and learn their personal information. Pretexting, or lying and misrepresenting themselves to gain access, is performed in personal visits, telephone calls, the US Mail, and even emails. Once they get close enough to view more information they can use, they will take and copy all they can get. Thieves also enjoy rifling the US Mail on days that salary and benefit checks are due to arrive, but they are likely already rifling the mails on other days as well to obtain live personal checks and credit cards.

Online, crackers will use an entire toolkit of social engineering, emails, fake websites (phishing), viruses, Trojan horse programs, worms, stealth-kits called "rootkits" to implant hidden software on a target computer, even keyloggers to record and report the keystrokes of computer users. Spyware and adware will also be employed to this end. The targeted information is the same, and all they can get will be exploited for money. Crackers will even sell gullible people the programs that they would hide to obtain the data, if possible. Not only free downloads can obtain data mining software; crackers can embed such data mining software in programs that appear useful and legitimate and tempting for a naive person to purchase online.

If a person develops an early habit of destroying personal and private documents, then it will be very difficult for any criminal to build a profile of private information on him or her.

Data mining for financial gain has already proved successful, so criminals will continue to use all means at their disposal, both online, and off, to develop this information.

Any individual who is so clean that they burn and shred personal information is not an easy mark for these criminals, and they will likely evaluate the individual for a much shorter time and move on to much easier people to steal data from. Good computer security habits will enhance the personal security of people who already shred and burn documents on a regular basis.

Learn more about this author, Raleigh Stout.
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