YOUR MONEY Saving Your Savings From Identity Thieves (NAPSA)—You maybe able to save yourself from becominga victim of the fastest-growing form of fraud in the U.S.—online identity theft. Approximately 27 million Americans have been victims of identity theft in the last five years, according to the Federal Trade Commission. While almost everyone is aware of computer viruses or spyware software, many users are not aware of a much more serious threat—phishing and pharming. In these types of attacks, a cyber criminal may send you an official-looking e-mail purporting to be from a financial institution where you have an account. Alternatively, the cyber criminal uses sophisticated network attacks to re-route the connection to your financial institution to a phony Website (all without your knowledge). So you open the e-mail, you log on to what you think is your bank’s Web site while the cyber crook “takes”all your log-on information. This person—or ring of criminals—can now log on from anywhere pretending to be you and can wipe out your entire sav- ings accountin seconds. To help you, there’s a cleverlittle device called the ID Vault. It’s a smartcard-based hardware solu- You can fight online fraud by storing all your important infor- mation on one device. tion that protects consumers directly from online fraud and identity theft attacks. The solution combines a USB security device with GuardID Systems’ Trusted Network of online financial institutions. The device lets consumers store all of their usernames and passwordsaccessible with a single PIN. The network currently includes over 6,000 financial institutions protecting users from online identity theft. It’s monitored and updated daily andis directly coupled to the security hardware, so users will never inadvertently send their sign-in credentials to a pharming or phishingsite. For more information, visit www.guardidsystems.com.
