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  3. Your Life Their Hands A On benches in parks, you can buy the things you simply can’t find in stores. After methamphetamine, the

Your Life Their Hands A On benches in parks, you can buy the things you simply can’t find in stores. After methamphetamine, the

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问题                          Your Life Their Hands
A  On benches in parks, you can buy the things you simply can’t find in stores. After methamphetamine, the hottest seller is fake ID. A complete identity package, including a permanent resident card (or green card) and a social security card, goes for $150 and takes about forty minutes to deliver. Armed with those, an illegal immigrant can apply for a driving licence, acquire a bank account, rent an apartment and get a legitimate job. It wouldn’t be so bad if the only customers for fake IDs were illegal immigrants. Unlike their undocumented brethren, these are folks who pay taxes and social-security contributions. Increasingly, however, the people buying (and stealing) ID documents are not illegal aliens but local internet crooks. Their preferred tools are phishing scams and key-logging programmes spread by "botnets" of hijacked computers to millions of innocent individuals.
B  Identity theft is one of the fastest growing white-collar crimes in the world. A fresh identity is stolen every four seconds. Some ten million Americans have been victims. The average cost of restoring a stolen identity is reckoned to be $8,000, and victims spend typically six hundred hours dealing with the nightmare—plus many years more restoring their good name and credit record. As a crime, identity theft is far more pernicious than traditional payment fraud—which happens when someone uses your ATM card or credit card illegally. Identity theft means that a crook obtains new bank accounts, credit cards, mobile phones, car leases, even apartment rentals in your name and without your knowledge. On average it takes a year for a victim to find out about the theft. As a result, few identity thieves get apprehended.
C  A new report, from an internet security firm called Symantec says that more than one-half of all the "underground economy servers" used for selling confidential information and captured personal data are located in the United States. The trade in personal data suggests that internet criminals have more or less given up hacking into banking systems and trying to steal databases of customer accounts. As financial services firms have tightened up, the crooks have started targeting the bank and credit-card accounts of individuals instead. In the underground marketplace, a credit card with its verification number can be bought for six dollars a pop. For buyers in bulk, stolen identities—including bank account, credit card, date of birch and social security details—go wholesale for around fifteen dollars apiece, offering a ten-fold mark-up when retailed. That beats pushing drugs any day. Symantec says that in the second half of 2006 some six million computers around the world were infected by "bots" (robotic pieces of malicious software), 29% up on the previous six months. Four out of five of them had been attacked by Trojan horses that sniffed out confidential information by logging keystrokes,  recording internet sites visited, and reporting the findings to a third party. Other unsuspecting users were redirected to fake websites where they were fooled by phishing scams into parting with their identity details.
D  Why this sudden upsurge in identity theft,? One factor, whether cause or effect, is a growing market in what the industry calls "zero-day exploits". The majority of security testers agree that the ethical thing to do when they discover a flaw in a computer programme is to give the manufacturer sufficient warning for it to prepare a software patch before going public with the finding. More and more ruinerabilities are being detected by shady hackers who auction their exploits off to the highest-bidding crooks. Nasty little zero-day tricks that exploit flaws in popular software go for $20,000 to $30,000 each. A zero-day exploit for Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system will fetch anything up to $50,000. A Trojan horse designed for stealing online account information can be snapped up for as little as $5,000. When a new exploit is unleashed on an unsuspecting market, it bypasses all the anti-virus software and leaves the susceptible programs maker scrambling with "zero days" to fix the vulnerability. By the time a patch is ready, the perpetrator has cleaned up and moved on.
E  What can you do to protect your identity? First off, change your passwords regularly—especially if you bank online or store personal information on a laptop that gets toted around and can be easily stolen. Freeze your credit record. No one can open a line of credit against your account without access to your credit record. That way you will also put paid to all those tiresome (and potentially dangerous) offers of pre-approved credit cards. Be especially leery of e-mail messages purporting to be from banks, stores or government agencies that ask for personal information. Never, ever respond to an e-mail request to verify your account number or password. Legitimate companies just don’t ask for such things as a matter of principle.
F  Protect your computer from viruses, spyware and other forms of malware. Always use a firewall plus an anti-virus program and a couple of anti-spyware packages, and set them to update themselves automatically.  Before buying anything online, check your browser’s status bar for a locked padlock symbol. Look also in the address bar and make sure it is using the secure form of the hypertext transport protocol (i.e. "https" rather than the insecure "http"). Finally, buy a paper shredder. That will discourage dumpster divers from fishing out pre-approved credit-card offers from your rubbish bin. It could be the best twenty dollars you’ll ever spend.
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