Cybercrime And Identity Theft Essay

In today’s world, we are all in some way connected to or involved with the Internet, it is really hard not to be. We all use different services that we feel either augment our daily lives or make them more pleasurable every day. We all take a sort of deceitful comfort in the basic inconspicuousness of the Internet. When we think about it, could it end up being the single biggest risk to our own safety? Most people don’t take the threat of cybercrimes as seriously because unfortunately they don’t realize just how life altering these threats are, until it’s too late. There are many types of cybercrime being committed daily that everybody needs to protect themselves from such as identity theft and fraud.

The Internet plays the biggest role in identity theft. On the Internet, a thief can hide from detection while stealing peoples’ identities from their homes, being able to steal peoples’ information one by one “then disappearing into another identity,” (Vacca 60). Internet fraud consists of two phases. The first being spoofing where a fake site is set up made to look like the real thing. Once that is completed the second phase, phishing, begins. This usually starts with an email that uses the

It is often disguised to look identical to the original keypad. Overlays allow thieves to capture your PIN number as you enter it, while still allowing the original keypad to receive the PIN number as well. By itself, an ATM overlay is not a tremendous source of identity theft. However, when combined with a mechanism that obtains your card information – such as a skimmer, loop, camera, or other device located at the ATM – a skimmer now allows the identity thief to have access to your bank account, including both your PIN and your debit or credit card number. As a component of ATM theft, ATM Overlay theft contributes to the estimated $1 billion in annual losses banks experience from ATM skimming