Posts tagged "Privacy Means Profit"

How To Control Your Privacy Online

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Identity theft is all about control. Who has control over your personal and financial information? Is it you, or the criminal on the other end of your computer using your information to apply for a credit card?  Losing control of your personal information can be all too easy online. But by taking some precautions, you can maintain privacy while safely surfing the internet.

Here are 5 tips to protect your privacy online:

1. Adjust social-network privacy settings

Facebook has been working to simplify their privacy settings, but they can still be confusing to the average users. Spend about 10 minutes a month making sure that your privacy settings are what they should be and are actually protecting your privacy.

To get there, log in to Facebook, in the top right of your screen it should say “Account” when you scroll over or click on that tab you can see you Privacy Settings. Click here for a step by step process of how to adjust your privacy settings.

Posted in Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker .
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Identity Theft Speaker Endorsed by Fort Bragg

I had the privilege of speaking at Fort Bragg this summer! Here is what they had to say:

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I saw John Sileo’s presentation at a conference recently and I was thoroughly impressed. He really interacted so well with the audience that I actually wanted to bring him to Ft Bragg to help us celebrate our Consumer Awareness Month. It took several months of coordination, but we finally all got it together and John came down and did an excellent presentation to help us out with teaching our community all about identity theft. His presentation was interactive, dynamic, the audience was really pleased and after the presentation they held him there for an hour asking great questions! We were thoroughly pleased with John and we really enjoyed his presentation.

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Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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Identity Theft for Businesses: Mobile Data Breach

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Mobile Data Theft

Technology is the focal point of data breach and workplace identity theft because corporations create, transmit, and store so many pieces of information digitally that it becomes a highly attractive target. This book is not intended to address the complex maze that larger organizations face in protecting their technological and digital assets. Rather, the purpose of this book is to begin to familiarize business employees, executives, and vendors with the various security issues facing them.
The task, then, is to develop a capable team (internal and external) to address these issues. In my experience, the following technology-related issues pose the greatest data-loss threats inside organizations:

  • Laptop Theft: According to the Ponemon Institute, 36 percent of reported breaches are due to a lost or stolen laptop.
  • Mobile Data Theft: Thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, tape backups, smart phones
  • Malware: Software that infects corporate systems, allowing criminals inside these networks

Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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Workplace Identity Theft: Shredding

The following is an excerpt from John’s latest book Privacy Means Profit. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit our website www.ThinkLikeASpy.com.

For businesses, shredding is low-hanging fruit (one of the easiest sources of data breach to eliminate). But businesses are so often focused on electronic forms of data breach that they fail to heed the following statistics highlighted in a recent Ponemon Institute study conducted for the Alliance for Secure Business Information:

  • More than 50 percent of sensitive business data is still stored on paper documents.
  • Forty-nine percent of data breaches reported in the survey were the result of paper documents.
  • Sixty percent of businesses admitted that they didn’t provide the proper tools (e.g., shredders) to safely discard documents that were no longer needed.
  • The average data breach recovery cost according to this survey was $6.3 million.

Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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Privacy Calendar

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In the Privacy Calendar, the action items that are important to take to protect your identity are listed by priority rather than mind-set. The order was determined according to three criteria:

  1. Which steps need to be taken first to make the process simple?
  2. Which actions are most effective at preventing identity theft?
  3. Which items are you most likely to complete given time and resource constraints?

The detailed information for taking each of the steps is contained in the individual mind-set chapters of Privacy Means Profit, which are shown in italics and enclosed in parentheses following the steps, for easy identification. I strongly recommend that you refer back to each chapter for in depth explanations of each step.
I also highly recommend that you set up a schedule for yourself and complete the items phase by phase. Take 10 minutes a day, one hour per week, or one weekend a month and schedule time to ‘‘accumulate privacy.’’ If you have to wait on one of the action items—for example, you order your credit report but it will be 10 days before you receive it—move on to another of the items further down the list and return to the item you skipped when you receive the report.

Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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Privacy Means Profit Barnes & Noble Release

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My girls messing around at the Barnes & Noble release of Privacy Means Profit.

Privacy Means Profit.

This book builds a bridge between good personal privacy habits (protect your wallet, online banking, trash, etc.) with the skills and motivation to protect workplace data (bulletproof your laptop, server, hiring policies, etc.).

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publish Date: 8.9.10 (August 9, 2010)
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN-10: 0470583894
ISBN-13: 978-0470583890

http://amzn.com/0470583894

Excerpt: At breakfast on the morning of August 12, 2003, a small and profitable computer company thrived at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. By lunchtime, that same business was on its way to ruin. Within twelve months, thanks to the theft of personal and company information, a forty-year-old family-business-turned-software-startup was doomed and John, heir to the prosperous enterprise, faced the prospect of prison for crimes he didn’t commit.

Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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5 Reasons NOT to Buy Our Latest Book!

Privacy Means Profit (Wiley) available in bookstores today!

Here are The Top 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Buy It:

You love sharing bank account numbers, surfing habits and customer data with cyber thieves over unprotected wireless networks

You never tempt hackers and con artists by using Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Docs, or other cloud computing platforms to store or communicate private info, personally or professionally.

You bury your head in the sand, insisting that “insider theft” won’t affect your home or business.

You’ve already hardened your laptops and other mobile computing devices in 7 vital ways,  eliminating a major source of both personal and corporate data theft.

You have a “thing” for identity theft recovery costs and would rather invest thousands in recovery than $25 in prevention.

If you want to defend yourself and your business against identity theft, data breach and corporate espionage, then buy a copy of Privacy Means Profit.

Posted in Cyber Data Security, Digital Reputation & Trust, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker .
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5 Steps to Good Privacy Habits

People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.
—Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

People don’t change bad habits until they have a compelling reason. Too often that compelling reason is the result of a habit’s negative outcome; but the promise of positive rewards resulting from the establishment of good habits can be a strong motivator. In the workplace, aligning responsible information stewardship with personal and professional gain can set the stage for good privacy habits.

Here are 5 steps you can take towards perfecting your own Privacy Habits:

  1. Tighten up online passwords. Create strong, alphanumeric passwords. Instead of your password being Sunflower make it $uNf(0w3R.  Don’t use common password reminders such as your dog’s name, street address, or mother’s maiden name. All of those would be easily uncovered by an identity thief.

Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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5 Business Survival Lessons from Google’s Spying

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A few months ago, Google got caught sniffing unencrypted wireless transmissions as its Street View photography vehicles drove around neighborhoods and businesses. It had been “accidentally” listening in on transmissions for more than 3 years – potentially viewing what websites you visit, reading your emails, and browsing the documents you edit and save in the cloud.

Public opinion blames Google, because Google is big and rich and and scarily omnipotent in the world of information domination. It’s fashionable to blame Google. What Google did was, to me, unethical, and they should eliminate both the collection practice and their archive of sniffed data.

Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker .
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