Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter has created an Identity Theft Unit to further assist identity theft victims and to provide additional resources to local law enforcement authorities that investigate and prosecute the crime.  The Unit is prepared to assist victims as we recognize 10th Annual National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW) March 2 – 8. 

In a study of Berkeley Law School fellow Chris Hoofnagle, Bank of America, HSBC, and Washington Mutual are the companies with the most identity theft incidents. While these banks have the most incidents per billions of dollars of deposits, ING Bank figures with a 0.085 percent. If Chase, Capital One and Citibank weren’t named so often in complaints, Bank of America, AT&T and Sprint were.

MySpace imagined a new way to protect users from phishing. What seemed to be a splash page showing up between links on MySpace and the external pointed sites, was actually a test for a new feature that advices users not to give their passwords.

New York state's Attorney General and legislative leaders present legislation to keep people online safe.On January 29, New York's attorney general and state legislative leaders put forward a bill whose objective is protecting people from sexual predators on the Internet. Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo offered their support.

ICONIX, Inc., the leader in providing visual email identification solutions, announced that its Iconix Truemark service is officially available to millions of PayPal account holders. What Iconix Truemark does is putting an icon next to legitimate email messages thus facilitating the visual identification of such messages by users and the prevention of phishing attacks.

ComputerWorld warns those using a WiFi router about a recent threat. It is strongly recommended to change its password otherwise you might risk to become one of the drive-by "pharming" attack victims which is based on URLs typing – it redirects you to bogus Web sites disguised as legitimate ones. Your private information could then be stolen.The be aware sign was triggered by Symantec security expert and blogger Zulfikar Ramzan who confirmed the existence of such drive-by pharming attacks.

Even if the best time to order a free annual credit report is considered to be the month January, it is also the time when you might get the surprise that someone has used your credit card or identity for getting some extra-money for holidays.

The period from November until January is, as the Identity Theft Resource Center reports, the most prosper moment for the thieves. They are somehow protected by the never ending shopping made now. People love to give, and receive, presents.

As SANS Institute Director of Research Alan Paller declared to SCMagazineUS.com.,
United States desperately seeks for the best ways to supervise all internet traffic to government and private-sector networks “to find the enemy within.” This pressing need was triggered by China’s incisive, non-stop campaign to break into important American government and industry databases.

J.C. Penny appointed the firm GE Money to run its credit card operations. But Thursday, an announcement regarding the lost of a backup tape that held personal details of almost 650,000 shoppers, seemed to reveal a J.C. Penny identity theft.

According to GE the tape has been missing since last October and it contains 150,000 Social Security numbers. A worker at a warehouse run by Iron Mountain Inc noticed the absence.

If so far the most irritating things with social networks were perhaps spam friend requests or “spamful” comments, now things how changed for the worse - MySpace users are in for much distress owing to malicious Windows exploits targeting them. Phishing seems to continue making numerous victims even after such a long time.