Countrywide Insider Stealing Two Million Personal Records is a Drop in the Data Compromise Bucket - Page 2

My guess is that the affected people will be offered some sort of credit monitoring/identity theft protection. While this prevents some forms of identity theft, it doesn't necessarily protect from all the ways a stolen identity can be used. Some examples of when it might not show up on a credit report are cases of medical benefit fraud, employment fraud, government benefit fraud, some forms of check fraud and, last but not least, when it is used to commit crimes other than those of a financial nature.

Recently, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, issued a well written fact sheet pointing out that existing credit monitoring/identity theft protection services do not protect a person from all forms of identity theft. I highly recommend that anyone who thinks their identity has been compromised read this fact sheet before buying or relying on the free protection offered in the aftermath of a known data compromise.

Employers are required to react to workers using social security numbers that do not match.  So what happens when the millions of illegal immigrants already here have to use real social security numbers and a matching name to remain employed, or obtain employment? While the federal law on this has been tied up in federal court, some states have already enacted this type legislation to check for matches. This type of identity theft normally doesn't appear on a credit report and is often discovered when a person files their tax return, or gets their social security earning statement and notices employment listed they never had.

A statistic that might support this is the IRS revealing that identity theft used to file tax returns has grown 644 percent in recent years. The two main reasons cited for this were people using them to obtain employment or to file a fraudulent tax return to obtain a phony refund, normally using what is known as the earned income credit.

Stories of large-scale data breaches seem to surface frequently. Despite this, there are a lot more that no one ever finds out about. Recent evidence revealed by Finjan, a computer security outfit, supports the contention that we really don't know how much stolen information there is out there, or how it is being used. Finjan has been discovering what they call "crime servers" on the Internet, which contain all kinds of stolen information. This information included compromised patient data, bank customer data, and even sensitive e-mail communications. At least some of this information wasn't even password protected on the crime server.

Article Author: Ed Dickson

Having worked around financial crimes for a number of years, I noticed they seemed to be on the rise. One reason for this is technology, which grows more rapidly than laws designed to protect us from it. …

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