Saving Your Savings From Identity Thieves

NAPS)-You may be able to save yourself from becoming a victim of the fastest-growing form of fraud in the U.S.-online identity theft. Approximately 27 million Americans have been victims of identity theft in the last five years, according to the Federal Trade Commission. While almost everyone is aware of computer viruses or spyware software, many users are not aware of a much more serious threat-phishing and pharming.

In these types of attacks, a cyber criminal may send you an officiallooking e-mail purporting to be from a financial institution where you have an account. Alternatively, the cyber criminal uses sophisticated network attacks to re-route the connection to your financial institution to a phony Web site (all without your knowledge). So you open the email, you log on to what you think is your bank’s Web site while the

cyber crook “takes” all your log-on information. This person-or ring of criminals-can now log on from anywhere pretending to be you and can wipe out your entire savings account in seconds. To help you, there’s a clever little device called the ID Vault. It’s a smartcardbased hardware solution that protects consumers directly from online fraud and identity theft attacks. The solution combines a USB security device with GuardID Systems’ Trusted Network of online financial institutions. The device lets consumers store all of their usernames and passwords accessible with a single PIN. The network currently includes over 6,000 financial institutions protecting users from online identity theft. It’s monitored and updated daily and is directly coupled to the security hardware, so users will never inadvertently send their sign-in credentials to a pharming or phishing site. For more information, visitwww.guardidsystems.com.

 

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