Tag: Theft
Your entire identity's worth just £80
Your name, your address, your mother’s maiden name, your passport number, the name of your first pet (“fluffles”? seriously?), your credit card numbers, your top five albums, your national insurance number. All that – what security experts call your ‘identity’ in the context of ‘identity theft’ – is worth just £80.
That’s the price that entire packages of data are going for on message boards and websites populated by fraudsters and scammers. A single piece of data can go for as little as £5. The data’s so cheap because there’s so much of it available – nearly half of all UK computer users aren’t using a firewall or security software.
All you’ve gotta do is make sure that your virus scanner stays up-to-date, and that you’ve got the security features in your operating system fully enabled and up-to-date. In fact go run Windows Update now. I’ll wait. Back? Good. Odds-are that you’re now pretty much safe.
Get Safe Online (via BBC)
Related posts: Microsoft on viruses and malware: It’s not our fault, guv. | FEATURE: Modern Day Malware & Organised Crime
STATTACK: You're twice as likely to get your phone nicked in London than in New York
If there was ever a reason to go to GameCityThree, rather than the London Games Festival, then this is it. Carphone Warehouse reckons that 25% of adults in London have had their phone nicked, compared to 15% in the rest of the country. 14% of British teenagers have had their phone stolen, compared to 9% of teens in the USA, and 7% of adults. In London in 2007, there were three robberies per 1000 people, whereas in New York, there were only 1.61…
eBay Nutcase of the Week: BT engineer given nine-month sentence for selling stolen equipment
Poor old Qamar Masood-Mirza was said to have been running an “unsophisticated” operation, in which he nicked equipment he was supposed to be installing in people’s homes in order to sell it on eBay.
The BT engineer made himself a £3k profit flogging stuff he’d nicked from his employers – money he’s been ordered to repay in return for his nine-month prison sentence for theft being suspended. BT colleagues suspected him of selling the “internet connection equipment” and looked for it on eBay – they found it and tracked Qamar down from his eBay ID, which he’d rather amateurishly registered using his real details…
Another phone exchange hit by thieves
The second London telephone exchange in as many weeks has been raided by thieves, who have taken tens of thousands’ worth of pounds of networking equipment. The raid at 3.45am took down three local ISPs and left many customers without any connection until 2pm yesterday…
The internet has been stolen
Well, it has if you’re lucky enough to live in Mayfair, London, anyway. A gang of thieves broke into a BT exchange and legged it with servers, routers and all sorts of other crucial hardware – leaving the local population without their Facebook fix for the evening…
Copies of GTA IV stolen before they reach shelves: couriers just can't resist
So very, very close now but it seems some people just can’t wait any more. Word has it that one delivery company alone has had to fire at least three employees in 24 hours for stealing copies of GTA IV…
CISTRAK – get an SMS from your stolen car
CIS has launched CISTRAK – a vehicle tracking device which allows motorists to locate a vehicle within 10 seconds.
Thieves can't be bothered with HD-DVD
That’s the spin the Blu-ray consortium would put on The DVD Dossier’s story about a theft at a Seattle branch of Blockbuster.
Apparently the thieves “knew what they wanted” – which involved clearing out the Blu-ray section and leaving all the HD-DVDs where they were…
