Do you ever wonder how much information is known about you? Well, I was preparing to give a security presentation and wanted to see just how much information I could legally find about myself for free or for a fee without connecting to any of my accounts. Here is a short list of the hundreds of facts I found about myself:
- I was able to find a past apartment complex I lived in, the dates I lived there and a list of the other tenants who lived there at the same time. For my current residence, it listed all my neighbors and their addresses along with their full names, ages and the names of their spouses and children.
- Every phone number associated with my name that I've used going back over 30 years.
- Every past employer, my company email address, phone number and a list of employees who worked at the company while I did.
- The date I joined Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. I saw the timeline of every connection I made on these social media sites without logging into my accounts.
- A list of every traffic citation I received in six different states and how many miles per hour I was traveling over the speed limit.
- The date, purchase price, current assessed value and address of every piece of real estate I've owned, along with how much in taxes are paid for each property.
- Every make and model of car I owned, date of purchase, registration address and vehicle identification number.
- The Data Universal Numbering System number, creation date, state filing number and other pertinent information for every one of the companies I've owned for the past 32 years across three states.
You're probably thinking this took me all day, but it was a simple search that lasted approximately 20 minutes. And with a single click, I could've seen reports on any listed person associated with my search, including former girlfriends, employers and neighbors.
Why is this important? The point of this exercise is to show you are not anonymous. Everything you've ever done is located in a database somewhere, and those databases have been monetized, allowing a small fee of $30 to assemble an entire history of your life. You, your family, your work history, your criminal history, your relationship history (if you lived with someone) and more is all just minutes away and accessible by anyone at any time.
Putting the pieces together, a criminal can target you with carefully crafted email messages that use social engineering. By clicking on just one bad link, you can open the vault to identity theft, and identity theft isn't just about getting credit in your name. We are now seeing the identities of cell phones being stolen and used to intercept the numeric PIN needed to reset some passwords to major banks and credit card companies. Within a few minutes of having your email compromised by a hacker, they could reset your bank password, intercept the PIN code, change the logon and wire transfer money.
You should take the time to get a password manager like LastPass, Dashlane or any reputable firm that can store and encrypt your passwords, allowing you to have unique and very long passwords for each site. Purchase identity theft protection on your homeowner's or renter's policy; it's dirt cheap at under $5 per month. Begin viewing each email, text message or link you see as a threat immediately, because you can easily be targeted -- you are not anonymous.
The information about you will never disappear, and it grows continuously.
If you are still not convinced, then simply realize you need to be 100-percent right on every online or electronic decision you make, whereas the bad guys only need to be right once. The information about you will never disappear, and it grows continuously. With over 600,000 malware variants created per day, I assure you the security you use will ultimately fail to abort a threat, so protect your identity now.
For more information, visit www.omnipotech.com or call (281) 768-4308.