An 'Ethical Hacker' On Protecting Your Identity

qwqwss writes "Canada.com is running an article by Terry Cutler, a 'certified Ethical Hacker', who wants to get the word out to people on protecting their identities from a growing number of risks. The piece covers shopping online, keeping your personal information contained, and avenues of inquiry if your identity is stolen."

Comments

Re:Hiding your credit report

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

One call to the Opt Out Request Line is all it takes to permanently remove your name from all marketing lists that the credit agencies supply to direct marketers.

And get your name on the "high-value" target list they sell to everyone else, and the "has something to hide" list they sell to the NSA.

Seriously, it is so bogus that in order to "opt out" you have to hand over your personal info -- SSN, address, full name - to the very same people who are abusing that info in the first place. Somehow I just don't trust them to keep it safe and never figure out a new way to abuse it for their own gain.

A real opt-out list would be maintained by a 3rd party with contractual and legal penalties for distributing your personal info. Then the agencies would be required send their lists to the 3rd who would filter out the people who have opted out. That way, even if the agencies were to reverse engineer the list by comparing before-and-afters, they would not know anything about the people whom they missed because they were never on the first list, nor would they get any sort of corrective information (like updated address, corrected spelling of names, etc).

Hell, while I am dreaming, these lists would be opt-in to start with and we wouldn't have these problems.

Get a Prepaid Master Card

[mfh]

That's what I did. Now if some joker gets my numbers, I can simply dump the card and get a new prepaid Master Card. Pfffft, eat that h4xx0rz! ;-)

Use Virtual Credit Card Numbers

[dakirw]

Some banks allow users to generate virtual credit card numbers (that can have dollar limits and specific expiration dates) for use with online purchases. Probably not a bad idea to buy things online with one of these generated online numbers (using the purchase amount as the limit).

Re:Hiding your credit report

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

People call BECAUSE those agencies have the information and have been selling it. So it is information they already have.

No, you are wrong.

I use a bogus name for my telephone directory listing (it is like getting an unlisted number, but better because it is free and it avoids having my real name on the "list of people with unlisted numbers"). I get tons of snail-mail marketing for this bogus person, I also get plenty of sales calls asking for this bogus person by name.

There is no way the credit marketing agencies are giving away this info because this person does not exist and the name was made up on the spot for the telephone listing - they certainly have no SSN and my real name is the one used for the bills so there isn't even any "credit history" to the name.

So you see, you are 100% demonstrably incorrect in saying that the sales contacts are due only to the credit marketing agencies. Even if this bogus person somehow did aqcuire an entry in their databases, there is no way for me to remove them because the person has no SSN to give them.