So let’s say you’re a hacker/id thief/scammer. You go online to hit the black markets of the internet to see what you can buy today–maybe some stolen credit card numbers perhaps? Oh my friend, you are behind the times–the hot new thing is simply usernames and passwords, according to BBC article. How on earth is a username and password more valuable to you, the hacker/id thief, than a credit card number. You can just plug that number into sites and start buying. The answer is pretty simple: people use the same logins and passwords for everything. Why would you simply want to steal a single credit card number when you could easily access all of their information, banking and otherwise.

Lifelock provides a great service in helping keep your identity safe but at the end of the day there has to be some personal responsibility to go with it. Lifelock serves as a pre-emptive strike against these types of people but once the damage is done then…well, you know how that’s going to end. Anyway, back to the article, apparently VoIP providers like Skype/Vonnage/etc, have yet to curb the budding eavesdropping of the relay of their messages.

So how much do these thieves charge for your information? Apparently about $12 for your credit card number and about $17 for your username and password. As a VoIP user myself I find this particularly disconcerting. On the bright side, though, VoIP is still relatively new and there haven’t been any major breaches of the networks yet. The key to avoiding this particular type of online fraud is simply to make sure you have different passwords to different sites. “I’ll never remember them all”, you say but think again. I’m even willing to tell you how I generate my passwords in the hopes that you’ll do the same thing. Take any site–let’s use Yahoo. I convert the first three letters of the domain name (in this case Yah) into numbers and immediately add that to the end of my “standard” password. I then take the total number of characters in the domain, subtract a secret number from it and then add that to the end. Bam, if you JUST do this you’re already on a better path to protecting yourself from this type of online fraud. Plus, once you have the pattern down you only have to remember ONE pattern and you’ll be able to generate passwords you can “remember” for all of the sites you use without having to use the same one.

Tags: lifelock, skype, voip, vonnage

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 1:08 am and is filed under Individuals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.