Identity Theft: A friends experience is a sobering lesson for all
What happened to an unfortunate teenage girl has lessons for all of us in both a personal and professional setting. Don't let Identity Theft happen to you.
Some of you will be familiar with the term “being fraped”,
it refers to “Facebook Rape” where a mischief making friend uses your PC or mobile phone when you are out of the room and posts an amusing or rude comment on your Facebook page ( masquerading as you).
Posting embarrassing comments is one thing, but recently I was asked to to help the teenage daughter of a friend who received the “full treatment” from an estranged partner and I feel compelled to explain how easy it was to completely hijack this person’s digital life.
Before I continue I would like to stress that this is ILLEGAL . If you knowingly access a private system you are breaking the law, much like stealing a car is still a crime even though the owner has left it unlocked with the keys still in the ignition.
I am able to access your Facebook, Hotmail or gmail page if you have allowed the password to be saved in the browser of a PC, left your smartphone lying around or simply failed to close the browser on a PC before me ( I can simply hit the back-back-back button until I get to your session ).
If I then take the opportunity to change the default email address and security questions in your profile, once I reset the password, you will be unable to regain control. Since I have changed the security questions, your only choice is to request a password reset, however the system will send the email to the account I have created.
If I have access to your main email account it is all over ( remember smartphones save the password for all your email accounts ). I can request password resets on any service that will email the new password or link to an email. Give me 10 minutes with an old phone that doesn’t even have a SIM card and I could probably hijack any number of services like facebook, paypal, ebay, itunes and skype. Some of these services, particularly PayPal or Ebay could result in significant financial loss.
In my friend’s case his daughter had been using a PC in a share house and lost control of her Facebook, Skype, Hotmail and Google accounts. The Skype account was linked to a credit card. During an online tussle that spanned many days we managed to cancel the affected accounts however we never regained complete complete control thus she had to start again from scratch.
Here are some steps that you can take lower the risk of identity theft happening to you:
- Ensure you have a password or PIN on the login screen of your Laptop, Phone and PC. The latest Android phones will do face recognition which will make a more secure life much easier.
- Never allow Browsers to “remember” passwords, especially on shared computers.
- When using shared PC’s ensure you properly close the browser after use.
- Avoid accessing Banking and Auction sites using an Internet Cafe or shared PC.
- Avoid “cross-linking” accounts, for example logging into a flickr account using your Google or Facebook credentials.
Please share some of your stories in the comments section and please add any suggestions you have for how we can better protect ourselves from this type of activity.