- New Jersey Life Insurance Individual identity protection Services.
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The acquisition of personal identifiers is made possible through serious breaches of privacy. For consumers, this is usually due to personal naiveté about who they provide their information to, or carelessness in protecting their information from theft (e.g. vehicle break-ins and home invasions). Guardianship of personal identifiers by consumers is the most common intervention strategy recommended by the Federal Trade Commission, Canadian Phone Busters and most sites that address identity theft. Personal guardianship issues include recommendations on what consumers may do to prevent their information getting into the wrong hands.
The strongest protection against identity theft is NOT to identify at all - thereby ensuring that information cannot be reused to impersonate an individual elsewhere. As such, identify theft is often a question of too little privacy or too much identification.
For example, biometric identifiers are sometimes used as a method of identification. However, because of inherent issues (e.g. cannot be kept a secret or changed) - biometrics can create a threat of identity theft. This threat can be reduced by only using revocable or cancelable biometrics, storing them in a tamper-resistant device, never sharing them, and cryptographically combining them with a secret, revocable key.
Our Professional Resident Agent, Dwain Ammons has been helping consumers with insurance decisions since 1986.
Call him at (888) 283-4749 for immediate help. - Identity protection by organizations.
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In their May 1998 testimony before the United States Senate, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) discussed the sale of Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers by credit-raters and data miners. The FTC agreed to the industry's self-regulating principles restricting access to information on credit reports.[1] According the industry, the restrictions vary according to the category of customer. Credit-rating services gather and disclosure personal and credit information to a wide business client base.
Governments, in registering sole proprietorships, partnerships and corporations do not make an effort to determine if the officers listed in the Articles of Incorporation are who they say they are, potentially allowing criminals access to personal information through credit-rating and data mining services. Other poor corporate diligence standards include:
a failure to shred confidential information before throwing it into dumpsters
the brokerage of personal information to other businesses without ensuring that the purchaser maintains adequate security controls
the theft of laptop computers being carried off-site containing vast amounts of personal information.
If corporate or government organizations do not protect consumer privacy, client confidentiality and political privacy, the acquisition of personal identifiers to commit unlawful acts will continue to be a prime target for criminals.[
- The false credentials.
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The combination of multiple high-security features,
biometrics, and well-trained document inspectors with
technical assistance can be very effective at preventing
forgery. However, all of these security techniques can
be rendered ineffective if the ID document is a "genuine
fake", that is, a genuine document issued under false
pretences.
One way of doing this is to present the document issuing authority with false credentials, which they will then endorse by issuing a new document. In this way, false identities and credentials can be "bootstrapped" over a period of time.
Another simpler way of generating false credentials is to suborn one of the officials involved the document issuing process. This may also be combined with the bootstrapping process above to mount complex attacks.
Corruption in the document-issuing process is hard to counter, since as the value of a credential increases, the economic incentives for corruption also increase. This is particularly true in the case of ID cards which combine many functions in one document, and for documents which are issued in large numbers, thus requiring many thousands of people to have authorizing powers.
Another systemic attack is to inject false information into the official database, in such a way that the database will recognize fake cards as being real.