ID Theft - What they do (part 1)
L33tdawg: This is part one of a three-part series. Enjoy.
Who are you, who is the person your chatting to?
(Scene One) its three o’clock in the morning your on your second case of coke and third pizza and the girl you just meet on #teen is the most amazing person in the world. You have shared secrets your best friend does not even know. (Little do you know the 16 year old blonde is a 26-year-old nasty little brute taking down your details and just might come visit you one day)
(Scene Two) you and your wife just found the house of your dreams and are down at the bank getting your loan and are told your loan was declined due to the fact that for the past 6 months you have owed $35,000 in loans and credit cards that you don’t have (some ID thief is drinking a nice bottle of wine thanking you)
(Scene Three) You have spent the past three months falling in love,
chatting till the wee hours of the morning, talking about your future once you graduate from University next semester… you arrange to meet the love of your life for the first time in person your at the airport to pick her up and all of a sudden you find your self in handcuffs being marched to a small room. (Turns out your 20 year old girlfriend was 13 and her mother found your cybersex emails and invitation to come visit you…now your looking at 2-8 for being a pedophile and seduction of a minor)
ID Theft is no longer just for kids carding a new piece of hardware with a credit card number the picked up on IRC. It has become big business, with loses estimated to be around 1.1 billion dollars a year estimate because people never find out about it or don’t report it.
At it most basic ID Theft maybe as simple a impersonating somebody or something your not on IRC, at its most complicated you have the thief taking loans out in your name getting credit cards under your name going to school, working or even getting a passport and traveling.
A lot of people do not realize just how much personal information the use of the Internet may allow to leak out. Now we are not talking big brother stuff here just your everyday information, some sites in the States allow a visitor to search for social security numbers, schools attended, even parking violations… these are all bits and pieces a thief could use to rape your financial world. A few months ago a Cracker put up a website freely distributing Credit card numbers, names and billing details from a site you found a exploit in. How many thousands of dollars had been wracked up on the credit cards of the people that had trusted the site we will never know. A Young lady I know found herself arrested when she tried to write a check, turns out a Thief had gotten a Drivers License in her name a checking and credit card account and an apartment. Then when about charging and bouncing checks all over town to the total of $168,000 including all the furniture, electronics, and computer equipment that was leased or rented under her name. The Thief then left the sates and flew to Europe on a using a passport under the young ladies name and proceeded to open accounts around Europe and do the same… this was six months ago and her name is still not cleared up.
Next article we will go into depth on just how the thief does it, a step by step on how they screw your world over.
Hunterose-
1.) Review: Norton Internet Security 2000 - Dhillon Andrew
2.) Dreamcast Underground - 101Bytez
3.) A look at ASPs (Application Service Providers) - Liquid Sphear
4.) Quake III on Linux - L33tdawg
5.) ID Theft - What they do - Hunterose
6.) Reversing a trojan - metaray!abrams
