« Starting a commercial blog | Main | Three steps to home business success »
March 05, 2006
Identity theft and online data protection
How many times have we heard of a financial institution's website getting hacked and confidential and sensitive customer data getting into the hands of cyber criminals.
Recently Payment processing arm of an Auto Surf site was hacked and all confidential information including photo ids of millions of members was available to hackers. They are now selling this information online for $1-$5 per document.
Yes its scary but true. To think that this will never happen to me is just avoiding the problem. Although you can never prevent identity theft taking place there are some steps you can take to minimize the damage.
Always keep a credit limit credit card or better a zero balance debit card for online payments. Low limit or zero balance will mean, even if the card number got hacked, chances of misuse are limited.
Keep a seperate bank account to link to payment processors like PayPal etc. Keep only the minimum balance in such accounts. Whenever you receive/send payments via your bank account, move the surplus to another bank account preferrably not in the same bank.
Never click on links from emails that appear to come from financial institutions like your bank or payment processor websites like PayPal or 2checkout. They will never send you any email asking to update confidential information. If in doubt, its best to call up the customer support number.
These are some of the steps that you can take to prevent financial fraud from affecting you however they are not full proof. They also do not save you in case the website of the payment processor gets hacked.
Posted by manish at March 5, 2006 06:00 PM
Comments
Hey buddy! How r ya doin man? Its really been a long long time since we last talked, hasnt it? well, what cud i do neway, lost my connection, moved to the city 4 some days. and here i am now, the good old shahin!lol.
hows everythin goin there with u mate?
Posted by: shahin at March 13, 2006 06:26 PM
and by the way, nice posts bro!
Posted by: shahin at March 13, 2006 06:27 PM