The ultimate invasion of privacy: Identity theft

Identity theft has become one of the fastest growing crimes. Most people are unaware of the amount of data they disclose over all the Internet services proposed by search engines, social networking sites, e-commerce web sites, free online tools, etc. They are also unaware that this data can be easily aggregated, data-mined and linked together, which may lead to a potential identity theft should it fall into the wrong hands. If one adds up all of his online searching, communicating, shopping, browsing, blogging, chatting, reading and news sharing, one would realize that one revealed a complete picture of oneself and perhaps some information about his relatives, friends, colleagues, employer, etc. The potential value of this data is considerable for criminals. This paper deals with identity theft and all the issues raised by this type of computer crime. More precisely, it illustrates the variety of information that hackers may want to sift through, the attacks that they may perform and the locations where they can find the information.