Identity Theft Protection Blog with Robert Siciliano

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
The load isn’t getting any lighter for the IT manager. While corporations are still trying to figure out the long term marketing benefits of social media, the security issues faced are a right now a problem.
Many companies restrict internal access. Others prevent employees from discussing or mentioning the [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert

Skimming data off of debit and credit cards has been happening at ATMs, gas pumps and electronic funds transfer point of sale terminals for quite some time.
When criminals plant skimming devices, they have to physically attach a skimming device that fits over the face of the ATM’s card slot. Then [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Naiveté: A lack of sophistication or worldliness. That sums up a lot of people I know. “There’s a sucker born every minute” is a phrase often credited to P.T. Barnum (1810 – 1891), an American showman. It is generally taken to mean that there are (and always will be) a lot [...]

New Hampshire, USA. “Live Free or Die,” baby. The official state motto emblazoned on every NH license plate has always intrigued. The thought of someone from NH might bring to mind revolutionaries or America militia sympathizers. New Hampshire has come a long way since its motto was created in 1945 and is not much different [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Dan Yost Chief Technology Officer of MyLaptopGPS brought attention to the Ponemon Institute, with sponsorship from PGP, has released their “Fifth Annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study.” As usual, the report is a treasure trove of great data (just like most people’s laptops are).
The average cost per breached data record [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Chip and PIN is the name of a government-backed initiative in the United Kingdom to implement the EMV standard for secure payments.
There have been rumblings from Europe over the past year about American based credit cards that solely rely on the magnetic strip not being accepted in the future due [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Financial institutions have the most to lose and the most to gain by improving security education of their clients and employees.
A while back I appeared on a local TV show talking about phishing. Amazingly, still, not everyone knows what phishing is. A good friend saw the show and was shocked [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Botnets are robot networks of computers connected to the Internet that sit in our homes and offices. A botnet is generally banks of multiple PC’s from the 10’s to 10,000’s to millions. There are no hard numbers on botnets but last figure I saw was somewhere between 3-5 million. Another stat [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Readers of these posts are familiar with ATM skimming. ATM skimming is a billion dollar problem and growing. A relatively new scam over the past few years is electronic funds transfers at the point of sale (EFTPOS ) skimming. People commonly swipe both credit and debit cards through the in-store machines [...]

Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
In the University of Cincinnati’s Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, the authors write “The general population must be engaged as active security providers, not simply beneficiaries of security policy, because their practices often create the threats to which government responds.” Somebody is saying to take personal responsibility and start [...]