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Twitter Your Way To Insecurity
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-04-04
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Web 2.0 concepts offer a lot of ways to make a lot of information about people available to others; Anonymizer's Lance Cottrell suggested this isn't always a great idea.
We chatted with Anonymizer founder Cottrell about some security concerns, namely those related to tax-time, and the potential for Web 2.0-style applications to do a lot more than enrich the online experience for their users.
Much has been made by a number of hardcore tech fans about Twitter, a site that allows people to send group SMS messages to mobile phones. Cottrell pointed out the obvious problem of telling one's list, "Hi, I'm out of town," if a bad person is watching those messages.
Boom, the Twitterer becomes an instant home burglary candidate. Now that's you're worried about that, let's talk about your tax return.
Filing taxes online has become a popular way of submitting the proper documents to the IRS. It's fast, and it takes the risk of having a return misread by an IRS scanner out of the process.
The concerns come from the threats that exist to consumers from the assorted criminals and their continuous attempts to steal personal information from people. A tax form contains about as complete a look at an individual as an identity thief could wish to receive.
Keyloggers on a system and man-in-the-middle pharming attempts, both of which would be invisible to the typical computer user, can quietly grab the juiciest bits of data and pass them along to a third party. The security of IRS or US Treasury websites and networks could be a concern, should they be compromised.
Filing online is probably safer today, Cottrell said. Issues with mailed paper returns, such as their becoming lost, damaged, or stolen in transit, can and have happened in the past.
It's not perfectly safe, but few things are.
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Tags: Internet, Security, IRS, Web 2.0, Twitter
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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