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    Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft
    Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft
    Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft
    Ebook41 pages16 minutes

    Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft

    By Ronald J. Leach

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    About this ebook

    Do you know how to protect your vital identity information when you use computers for your banking, credit card transactions, and everyday purchases? What about when you are using email, web surfing, texting, or social networking? You’ll learn about these in Twelve Steps to Avoid Identity Theft.
    What do all these companies, organizations, and people have in common?
    •Heartland
    •RBS Worldpay
    •Citizens Financial Group Inc
    •Hannaford Brothers Co
    •TJX Companies Inc
    •Marshalls
    •TJ Maxx
    •CardSystems Solutions
    •The U.S. Internal Revenue Service
    •Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
    •Wyndam Worldwide Corporation (Wyndam hotels)
    •Zappos
    •Sony’s online accounts for Play Station users
    •Verisign
    •LinkedIn

    The sad answer is that all of them have suffered well-publicized recent successful attacks from identity thieves. Many of these attacks involved thieves obtaining access to confidential financial information from thousands, and in some cases, millions, of customers.
    How can you protect yourselves from this crime? In this book we describe 12 1/2 suggestions that can strongly reduce, or even eliminate, the likelihood of you being an identity theft victim. Why 12 1/2 steps? Because twelve of the steps are ones that you can begin to take right away, and the other will require you to do some additional work reading up on this vital topic.
    Here are the twelve and a half simple steps to help avoid identity theft:
    1.Strip to a bare minimum
    2.Don’t Pameiob
    3.Be strong
    4.Watch for zombies
    5.Watch for vampires
    6.Free is too costly
    7.Don’t give too much credit
    8.Surf safely
    9.Gullible’s travels
    10.Don’t give it up if you don’t have to
    11.Just the FAX, please
    12.Be shrewd and shred
    12 1⁄2. Get more information

    This short, easy-to-understand book, intended for the general, non-specialist reader, will tell you what to do and what to avoid when going to a bank, pharmacy, or doctor; shopping in person; traveling; or using any kind of electronic commerce. You’ll learn about the most common security weaknesses of modern banking and e-commerce software and when to avoid using certain software systems, the tell-tale signs of potentially insecure transmission of your data, and how to avoid the dangerous practice of “Pameiob.” You'll learn how you have to protect yourself from the kinds of identity theft that can occur even if YOU never do any online shopping.

    This book is a brief, easy-to-understand guide that is dedicated to keeping your assets and identity safe while navigating this dangerous world. The book is based on the author's experiences as a long-term identity theft consultant and lecturer and computer scientist.

    Want more detailed information on identity theft? Then “Identity Theft in the Cyber Age” is the book for you.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRonald J. Leach
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9781301587957
    Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft
    Author

    Ronald J. Leach

    About the Author I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair.  (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.)  While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States.  We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university.  I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department’s hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users.  We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems. As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads.  I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications.  My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists.  More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television. I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas. My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years.   I was the editor or co-editor of that society’s journal for many years.

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