IDTheft

Identity theft

Link: http://www.utdallas.edu/infosecurity/

The link that I have provided above for the article deals with the Identity (ID) theft in the University of Texas Dallas. ID theft is one of the major problems faced in the internet and real world. Most people always have either their cell phones or their laptops/desktops as the storage device for their personal and confidential information. Most of the ID theft incidents occur when these gadgets are not secured properly.

The reason why I chose this article is because it summarizes the id theft incident in a university environment. There is a general notion that students are least affected by Id theft, but according to me, students are equally affected as anybody else like a business/financial person. The reason why students are affected can be listed by the following points

• There is a wide assumption that students don’t own much. But in today’s world the basic necessities itself include a cell phone, laptop and a car.
• Students mostly do not follow up with the transactions they make thinking that they are not important.
• Most of the students have some kind of a job that gives them their SSN. From then on they are like anyone else out in the business world.
• Apart from the natives there are lots of international student population in the US universities and there students most of the time do not know how the SSN and other stuffs work here and are more prone to such attacks .

On summarizing the monetary stuffs that the student own, their laziness, their lack of awareness make them equally prone to such ID theft attacks.

Talking about the university, some universities use SSN, first and last name, date of birth as the login Ids and passwords. They also require the students to provide all their details to the university for its various purposes. When these details are compromised then that’s not a loss for a single student but the whole huge population.

This particular article details how the breaching of the university network has compromised the personal and confidential records of thousands of students belonging to that university.

Some ways to avoid such breaches are

• High physical and network security,
• Not using SSN, names or date of births as passwords, having strong passwords
• Securing all personal and confidential information in a separate and secure device or storage and not storing them in a shared medium.
• Following up all the incidents or changes that are suspicious.