The four most vital pieces of information for an identity thief is an individual’s name, home address, social security number, a bank account number. A thief may not be able to obtain all four pieces, but other personal information such as a date of birth may be stolen instead. In today’s contemporary society, there are three main forms of identity theft. The first and also most common form of theft is an individual’s financial identity. This form of identity theft is most widely known because the reason for stealing such information is to purchase items at the expense of the victim. This is typically carried out by either opening credits card in the victim’s name, or draining the money saved in his or her bank account (Norum, 2007). The
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The most common device used amongst identity thieves is a “skimmer” (Alberecht, 2011). The device is used to collect personal information from machines that an individual would use to swipe their credit card. A skimmer works identically to the machine that processes an individual’s credit card, but rather than sending the information to a bank, the information is fed directly to the perpetrator. Examples of such machines that are targeted by identity thieves are ATM machines and gas pumps because their location is often accompanied with very little, or sometimes no security. As a result, perpetrators can freely use skimmers on ATM’s and gas pumps during off hours and obtain credit card information from potentially hundreds of …show more content…
As an increasingly popular trend, the network security of companies is constantly being upgraded or patched in order to close up possible “loop holes” in the system. Hacking is a process during which a perpetrator(s) attempts to bypass the security of a company’s system in order to gain access to a mass amount of personal information. This method has become a common practice among identity thieves due to prior cases of success that hackers have had. For example, in 2011 a hacker had successfully hacked into Sony’s network and had gained access to approximately 77 million users personal information including names, addresses, usernames, and passwords (Baker & Finkle, 2011). Although hacking into a company’s network is seldom an easy task, the volume of personal information than could be compromised for doing so serves as motivation for hackers to “crack the
The most common device used amongst identity thieves is a “skimmer” (Alberecht, 2011). The device is used to collect personal information from machines that an individual would use to swipe their credit card. A skimmer works identically to the machine that processes an individual’s credit card, but rather than sending the information to a bank, the information is fed directly to the perpetrator. Examples of such machines that are targeted by identity thieves are ATM machines and gas pumps because their location is often accompanied with very little, or sometimes no security. As a result, perpetrators can freely use skimmers on ATM’s and gas pumps during off hours and obtain credit card information from potentially hundreds of …show more content…
As an increasingly popular trend, the network security of companies is constantly being upgraded or patched in order to close up possible “loop holes” in the system. Hacking is a process during which a perpetrator(s) attempts to bypass the security of a company’s system in order to gain access to a mass amount of personal information. This method has become a common practice among identity thieves due to prior cases of success that hackers have had. For example, in 2011 a hacker had successfully hacked into Sony’s network and had gained access to approximately 77 million users personal information including names, addresses, usernames, and passwords (Baker & Finkle, 2011). Although hacking into a company’s network is seldom an easy task, the volume of personal information than could be compromised for doing so serves as motivation for hackers to “crack the