Beware of identity thieves

We have all heard of intincts, intuition, and perception. In fact, all of us experience these things. Some writers have opined that one of the greatest attributes of an entrepreneur is a well formed instinct.

Having these attributes is not the important thing; the important thing is knowing how to use them. You may have invested a huge amount of resources into building your digital presence but just around the corner someone is making an attempt to steal your identity.

Without using your instinct and a little bit of precaution, you might have a hard time protecting yourself from these identity thieves.

Some of the latest online threats are coming from social networking sites (Facebook, Google+, etc.), this is largely because we have become vulnerable due to our  "web-of-trust" (i.e. trusting someone because your other Internet acquaintances trust them, or you believe you know who someone claims to be in real life).

When we update our status on Facebook, send tweets on Twitter, socialise on Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, send our CV via the email or upload it on a website, chances are that we are making ourselves vulnerable to attacks.

Everyday, we put more of our information on the Internet exposing ourselves to people that have made it their business to know so much about us.

I recall receiving an email from a friend, the entire details including the family background of my friend was correct, he had travelled to India for further studies and I was glad to receive an email from him. I was however surprised when he requested that I send him some money stating that he was stranded in Bombay.

My initial thought was to send help to my friend but on a second thought, I decided to probe further and that was when I discovered that my friend's email had been hacked and the email was from an identity thief. That little precaution saved me a lot of drama.

These identity thieves are well organised and intelligent, they continuously move around in search of victims. When you're surfing the web, there are some basic things that you can do to protect yourself.

- Be careful not to share too much personal information online that can be used against you like your mother's maiden name, your physical or mailing address, personal email address, etc. If a friend or family member asks you for money because they're stuck somewhere or they have some type of personal emergency; call to verify.

- Be careful about which online accounts are linked together. For example, if an attacker obtained a person's Facebook account password, they would have access to any other site especially since the majority of people use the same passwords accross various platforms.

- Strengthen the answers for your "security questions" which are used to reset your password to your online profiles. For instance if the security question is, 'where were you born ?' Your answer could be 'Lagos'. You would be correct but that is an easy guess for an identity thief. It would have been better to say, 'St. Peter's Hospital, Lagos State'

- Don't share your passwords with anyone; use strong and unique passwords for every site; and be sure to change it if you sense that your account might be compromised.

- Make sure to set your desktop computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone to auto-lock with a PIN or password when they're inactive. Even if they're in your home, and you're the only one using them, it is wise to lock with a PIN. You would be surprised the amount of information a third party can have just by scrolling through your personal gadgets.

- Don't respond to requests (e.g. email or from posts on a social networking site) for personal information (e.g. Phone number, financial information, etc.) from anyone.

- Apply caution when clicking links or opening an attachment, even if it's been sent or posted by a reputable source. Just by clicking a link, a virus could be dropped on your system; this virus could be used to monitor your activities.

- Adjust the privacy settings of your social networking accounts site to help protect your identity.

- Be careful who you "friend" on the social networking sites, unless you really know the person. While I agree that there is strength in number, I also believe that having 500 genuine and trustworthy online friends is better than having 1000 individuals that are waiting for a loose end.

In conclusion, identity thieves have been using data from social networking sites to perform social engineering attacks against individuals for quite a while. If you sharpen your instinct and apply some of the precautions prescribed here, you would be a hard nut for them to crack.



Punch