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Identity Theft Jumps By 50 Percent
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-03-08
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Over the past three years, around 15 million Americans suffered an identity theft loss, with retail e-commerce breaches, phishing, and online auction scams among the reasons.
 | | Identity Theft Jumps By 50 Percent |  |
People lost an average of $3,257 through the middle of 2006 when victimized by identity theft. That was the determination made by Gartner when surveying 5,000 US adults for their latest study of this crime.
The Federal Trade Commission had determined 9.9 million US citizen were identity theft victims in 2003. By the middle of 2006 according to SC Magazine, that had increased to the 15 million mark.
Retail sites were especially tempting targets for a gang of thieves operating out of Eastern Europe. A Gartner analyst said in the report that the group "started these external hacks" that led to security breaches.
TJX has been a recent newsmaker due to the intrusions it suffered over a long period of time to its retail systems. That breach has led the state of Massachusetts to consider civil penalties for companies that fail to protect customer data.
Windows Live suffers Italian takeover: Symantec has reported Italian activity against Windows Live by a group of link-baiting criminals operating under the name Gromozon.
The gang has managed to "link bomb" Microsoft's search engine with a number of hot keywords, which link to a large number of domains they control. Alex Eckelberry at Sunbelt Software, which first documented this takeover, said 95 percent or more of the links they've found on Live Search in Italian lead to malware or exploit sites.
But Symantec said the JavaScript in the linked pages are redirecting people to domains that aren't currently hosting malicious content.
UPDATE: I've heard from Sunbelt Software about this story, and they noted the domains are delivering malware, contrary to what Symantec has seen. From a Sunbelt email:
I can confirm that just yesterday several tests showed them loading exploits and dropping malware on one of our machines. Either the guys at Symantec didn't have an Italian IP when they looked at the sites (the actual exploit pages are loaded ONLY if an italian IP is detected server-side, typical gromozon technique), or they hit some of the very few sites that didn't work properly.
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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