Identity Theft: Information Security Breach

What is identity? The word itself can have so many connotations, definitions, and subjects tied to it. However, the most basic definition of our identity would be the qualities, beliefs, and baggage that make up each person. An identity is something that each of us have a claim to from the moment we are born to even past our death. Through the recent technology surges however, our most basic claim is now threatened. We have all heard about crime on the streets but with the creation of social networking websites, online shopping, and just interaction websites we are making ourselves vulnerable to a new type of crime: online identity theft. Identity theft is the term for the criminal act of stealing your personal

There is a thief that lurks around us everyday; this thief can attack in brad day light or in the darkest hour, and just about anywhere you may find yourself. This thief has the power to act in your name, make unlimited purchases, open up credit accounts and ruin your good name and credit all in the matter of seconds; if you are vulnerable enough, you might become his next victim. In many cases all he needs is your name and a social security number, and he has enough information to make you his next victim; if you don’t believe me then ask the millions of Americans that became victim’s, or just ask me. The thief that I am talking about is identity theft. Identity theft is a

Have you ever received a credit card bill at the end of the month with a ridiculous amount of money needed to be paid that you never spent? This is because of identity theft. The FTC estimates that each year, over 9 million people are affected by identity theft. According to Sally Driscoll, this is because almost anyone with a computer and a slight bit of computer knowledge can pull off identity theft. Experts also claim that identity theft is the fastest-growing crime in the world. Identity theft is a global problem that cannot be stopped without effective measures. The problem is, effective measures are very hard to come by when dealing with identity theft because almost any security protocol can be by-passed.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that requires covered entities to maintain reasonable and appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards for protecting electronic patient health information (e-PHI) (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules). Entities must: 1) ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all e-PHI they create, receive, maintain, or transmit; 2) identity and protect against reasonable anticipated threats to the security or integrity of the information; 3) protect against reasonable anticipated , impermissible users or disclosures; and 4) ensure compliance in the workplace. Entities must review and modify security measures to continue protecting e-PHI in a changing environment. They are required to run risk assessments as part of security measures, implement security measures that reduce risks and vulnerabilities to a reasonable and appropriate level, and designate a security officer responsible for developing and implementing its security policies and procedures.

In American society, there a fast growing white-collar crime that is becoming more and more popular among criminals. This white collar crime is call identity theft. Thousands of people have their identities stolen every year. Identity theft happen when criminals get a hold and use other people persona information such as credit card numbers, bank accounts numbers, insurance information and social security number to purchase good and other services fraudulently. More than 9 million American are victimizes by identity theft each year. With this number being so high it is evident that identity theft is one of the fast- growing crimes to hit the United State. Three reason why identify theft if being such a fast- growing crime in the United State is because more people credit card information is being stolen, more people are shopping online and more medical information is being stolen.

This case study, written in 2009 is not the only case where a major data breach has occurred within organizations. In the late 2011 Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) was breached impacting up to 77 million user’s accounts including data on names, address and possibly credit card details. In late 2013 Target had a cyber-attack that compromised a large quantity of its data and had 110 million accounts compromised. Finally in September 2014 Apple had their iCloud server breached by hacking that compromised all the users of the online server. These occurrences still have some unanswered questions and several experts have yet to decipher the actual reason as to why the security breach occurred.

In the past 12 months, there have been nearly 432 million accounts hacked belonging to many websites and applications. Many of this information stolen was sensitive, personal data such as credit card information, phone numbers, passwords, and even addresses.

While looking through the Bureau of Statistics Website, I came across the Victims of Identity Theft, 2014 Bulletin, where I found some interesting statistics.

Identity theft is said to be one of the fasting growing crimes in America. According to our textbook, the lifestyle exposure theory, explains the different levels of exposure risk and how some people are exposed to higher risk than others depending on their lifestyle. Identity theft or fraud is when someone takes illegal actions and steal someone’s personal information to gain something from it. The theft can gain access to demographic information easily from the internet to get your name, email address, telephone number, birthday, and even your physical address (Archer, 2012).

According to the FTC, Identity theft topped the Federal Trade Commission’s national ranking of consumer complaints for the 15th consecutive year. There are eight different types of identity theft: Financial Identity Theft, Driver’s License ID Theft, Criminal ID Theft, Social Security ID Theft, Medical ID Theft, Insurance ID Theft, Child ID Theft, and Synthetic ID Theft. As I read though the list of potential identity theft issues, it honestly made me want to crawl under a rock, it is very unsettling that there are so many ways in which someone can become you. And the fact that many times we never know that a breach of our private data has occurred is equally unsettling.

Dr. Deming, identity theft is when someone steals your personal information such as your social security number or name (Brown, DeHayes, Hoffer, Martin & Perkins, 2012). Once the theft obtains one’s information, one uses it to create a fraudulent documents such as credit applications, income taxes, and other items. These actions can damage your credit and it cost one money and time to restore their name to good status. There are different type of identity theft that can occur. Those are: child, tax, medical, senior, or social theft (Kess, Grimaldi, Revels, 2017). When clearing your name of identity theft, one must contact each vendor where fraudulent activity has occurred. Also, one must report it to the proper law enforcement and the federal

of identity theft rose to 6.4 million. Data from 2008 found that 11. 7 million families were victims of one or more type of identity theft, 53 % of the victims were credit card fraud. In 2010 8.6 million families were victims of identity theft. Roughly 16.5 million residents in 2012 experienced identity theft with 85% of the identity theft involving the fraudulent use of credit card and financial account information. In 2014 approximately 17.5 million residents of the United States were victims of identity theft with an increase of 2.6 million elderly victims (see Figures 1and 2) (Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS),

Identity theft is the fastest growing fraud crime in America (Finklea, 2009). Gaining knowledge in preventing theft will better the economy and lower the crime rates in America. There are reported 9.9 million victims of identity theft and this number is increasing rapidly as the years go on. It has been reported that an estimate of fifty billion dollars has been charged to our consumers every year due to identity theft (Finklea, 2009).

With the increased and widespread use of technologies, interest in data mining has increased rapidly. Companies are now utilized data mining techniques to exam their database looking for trends, relationships, and outcomes to enhance their overall operations and discover new patterns that may allow them to better serve their customers. Data mining provides numerous benefits to businesses, government, society as well as individual persons. However, like many technologies, there are negative things that caused by data mining such as invasion of privacy right. This paper tries to explore the advantages as well as the disadvantages of data mining. In addition, the ethical and global issues regarding the use of data mining

Cyber criminals take pride in creating chaos, and the chaos that cyber criminals inflict on their victims can be crippling to individuals and corporations. We have all heard about hackers getting information from major retail chains as well as information being leaked that included Social Security numbers for millions of people. We use the internet with somewhat of a naivete expectation that all of our information is safe. That is, until something untoward occurs, and then it can be all out panic.