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Latest "Fraud Detection & Prevention" Posts
By Mickey Murphy
Information security. Identity theft. Black hat hackers. This all sounds like three-alarm lingo from some old DC comic book: “Immediately sign over all of your wealth, or I will hack you and steal your identity!” What do these oblique, non-intuitive terms mean? Here is how Wikipedia defines them: Information security — “Protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction.” Identity theft — Fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.” Black hat hackers (also known as crackers) — “Hackers who specialize in unauthorized penetration” of computer systems, as opposed to white hat hackers who test computer systems for companies to determine their penetrability.
However we characterize them, information security, identity theft and so on represent major challenges today.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Company Protection, Convention Planners, Corporate Incentive Travel, identity theft expert, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Meeting Planner Safety, meeting planners, Meeting Planners Guide
John Sileo knows identity theft and data breach first hand – he became “America’s Leading Identity Theft Speaker and Expert” after losing his business and more than $300,000 to these costly crimes. He has provided these Identity Theft Resources to help you protect your organization from suffering from the losses that result from unprotected private information. Visit John’s Identity Theft Prevention Store to learn more.
Hire John to train your employees to prevent identity theft, data breach and corporate espionage
Safe data is profitable data, whether it’s a client’s credit card number, a patient’s medical file, an employee’s benefit plan or sensitive intellectual capital. By the time John finishes his hilarious closing story, your audience will be fully empowered to protect private information, at home and at work.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Data Breach, Data Breach Training, Fraud Training, Identity Theft Prevention, Identity Theft Resources, identity theft training, Information Security, seminars, Speaking, Speech, Speeches, training, workshops
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:
- 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 John Sileo.
Tags: 5 steps, identity theft expert, Identity Theft Prevention, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Privacy Habits, Privacy Means Profit, Protection
Businesses often make social engineering (or fraud) training boring! And that’s bad for your bottom line, because no one ends up remembering how to protect your organization against threats like data theft, corporate espionage or social networking exposure.
Too often, fraud and social engineering workshops cover just the concepts that define fraud rather than the feelings that signal it’s actually in process at the moment. The key to training your executives, employees and even customers on fraud is to let them experience what it feels like to be conned. In other words, they need to actually be socially engineered (manipulated into giving away their own private information) several times throughout the training so that they begin to reflexively sense fraud as it is happening. Like learning to throw a ball, there is no substitute for doing it for yourself. Fraud detection is similar; it takes actually doing it (or having it done to you) to fully understand the warning signs. Anything less will leave your audience yawning and uneducated.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Business Speaker, Detection Fraud, Engineering Social, Financial Speaker, Fraud Detection, Fraud Training, Fraud Training Expert, social engineering, Social Engineering Speaker, Training Fraud
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 John Sileo.
Tags: Data Breach, Financial Speaker, Google, John Sileo, Privacy Means Profit, Sniffing, Unencrypted, Wireless
Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s new iPhone 4 on June 7 in San Francisco. While the new features keep the iPhone at the forefront of technology, they also cause some privacy concerns.
One concern that carries over from previous iPhone models is the Always-on iPhone Apps that track your every move through the GPS navigation system. Back in April, Apple began allowing location-tracking applications to run in the background. So, for example, companies like FourSquare, Yelp, and Facebook can continuously track your location, providing automatic notifications to your friends when you are less than 1/2 mile away from them, if you allow them.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Apple, Data Breach, identity theft expert, Information Privacy, iphone 4, John Sileo, Privacy, Social Networking Speaker, Steve Jobs
Quoted from the original CSO Online story:
Social engineering stories: The sequel
Two more social engineering scenarios demonstrate how hackers still use basic techniques to gain unauthorized access, and what you can do to stop them
By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor
May 27, 2010 —
John Sileo, an identity theft expert who trains on repelling social engineering, knows from first-hand experience what it’s like to be a victim. Sileo has had his identity stolen—twice. And both instances resulted in catastrophic consequences.
The first crime took place when Sileo’s information was obtained from someone who had gained access to it out of the trash (yes, dumpster diving still works). She bought a house using his financial information and eventually declared bankruptcy.
“That was mild,” said Sileo, who then got hit again when his business partner used his information to embezzle money from clients. Sileo spent several years, and was bankrupt, fighting criminal charges.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: CSO Online, Fraud, Fraud Training, Fraud Training Expert, Fraud Workshops, John Sileo, Scams, social engineering, social engineering expert
FTC Red Flags Rule Goes into Effect June 1st, 2010
The FTC will begin enforcing the Red Flag Rule on June 1st, which states that certain businesses and creditors must help fight identity theft as well as create an identity theft prevention plan. This applies to a very broad class of businesses: those defined as “financial institutions” and those that extend any type of credit to their customers.
In other words, if you don’t receive cash the moment you deliver your product or service to your customer, your business most likely falls under the umbrella of the Red Flags Rule. If you do any billing after the fact (i.e., accounts receivable), you are considered a creditor, and therefore in the group of companies governed by Red Flags.
This includes:
- Any Business that Extends Credit
- All Banks
- Most Brokerage Firms
- Credit Card Companies
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Video Tips by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Boot Camp, Business Identity Theft, Business Survival, Compliance, FTC, Identity Theft Prevention, John Sileo, Privacy Survival, Red Flag, Red Flags, Red Flags Rule
Your business-class photocopier is essentially a computer that can be hacked. It has a hard drive and saves an image of everything you copy. Customer data, invoices, employee records, intellectual capital, personal identity. This is not new information – we’ve been writing about it for years. But the press is finally beginning to pay attention because they have seen for themselves the type of data that can be extracted from corporations by purchasing their used copiers (see the excellent CBS video to the left).
If you’ve attended on of my Privacy Survival Boot Camps or have seen me speak for your organization, you will recognize the spy terminology used below that I use to train on effectively evaluating privacy risks. Here is a brief primer to help you get started on protecting your business from this threat:
Posted in Burning Questions (Video), Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Video Tips by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Hard Drives, Identity Theft Prevention, Information Privacy, Information Privacy Professional, John Sileo, Photo Copier, Photo Copiers, Photocopier, Photocopier Identity Theft, Photocopiers
