Identity theft complaints rose to more than 11 million last year, and tax-related scams have increased by over 700% since 2008. Two million fraudulent tax returns were filed in 2011 alone, at a cost of two billion dollars. Common scams include: Double filing: If you receive a notification from the IRS informing you that multiple…
An employee of the Utah State Department of technology must have hit the snooze button when he launched a test server that resulted in the breach of 780,000 Medicaid records including over 250,000 Social Security numbers. The Governor of Utah was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune saying “Individuals provide sensitive personal information to the government in a…
The 2012 Identity Fraud Report: Social Media and Mobile Forming the New Fraud Frontier report released by Javelin Strategy & Research Data Breaches increasing and more damaging – “One likely contributing factor to the fraud increase was the 67 percent increase in the number of Americans impacted by data breaches compared to 2010. Javelin Strategy…
Smartphones now make up half of all activated mobile phones. And as we know, smartphones are small computers, capable of performing most of the same functions as a PC, primarily through the use of mobile applications. Some claim that mobile malware threats are still too scarce to worry about. But while PCs definitely remain the…
Hello Friends, Colleagues, Clients, Media, Readers and all those who we’ve ever come in contact with: The following is one sentence of business updates AND THEN more importantly, Robert’s running the Boston Marathon next week, Monday April 16th for Children’s Hospital Boston. Sick kids need your help. Quick Biz: Robert was in Time Magazine http://ow.ly/adxbp in March, VERY…
Near Field Communications (NFC), is the exchange of information between two devices via wireless signal. For example, a wireless signal emitting from your cell phone can act as a credit card when making a purchase. In the case of a mobile wallet application, those devices would be a mobile phone and a point of sale…
If you were hit by a bus, and passed on to whatever heaven might exist, would you care about your Facebook page? Probably not. But your loved ones more than likely would. Things like email, websites, and social media profiles are considered “digital assets,” which may have some monetary value, but for the most part…
Users of online and mobile banking know that financial institutions have a layered security approach in place. Those layers include multifactor-authentication, which may mean requiring users to punch in a second security code or carry a key fob, as well as due diligence in identifying customers as real people whose identities haven’t been stolen, and…
The 2012 Identity Fraud Report: Social Media and Mobile Forming the New Fraud Frontier, released by Javelin Strategy & Research reports that in 2011 identity fraud increased by 13 percent. More than 11.6 million adults became a victim of identity fraud in the United States, while the dollar amount stolen held steady. Identity theft occurs when…
Over the last decade many computing tasks that were developed to be performed locally on and office PC have now moved to the cloud such as contact managers, office documents, media editing programs, you name it: if there is a software version, there is probably a cloud-based version, and often for free. Just search for the…
