Kevin Mitnick: Consumer Vigilance Can Thwart High-Tech Crooks
from the learn-from-the-master dept
With all the fear going around these days concerning identity theft and other online crimes, who better to tell us what to do to protect ourselves, than Kevin Mitnick – who knows better than most how easily people can be tricked. Just like he points out in his book, while security technology is useful in preventing computer security breaches – the real problem often comes on the human side of the equation. He applies those same ideas to the problem of identity theft. People are often tricked into giving away information by people pretending to be authority figures who are trying to “help”. By educating people how these schemes work, he’s hoping that individuals will be more vigilant about giving out information to just anyone. Update: In a related story, it appears that some folks set up a dummy page to try to convince Comcast cable modem subscribers to give up their passwords.