Surveys: Identity theft more critical than incursion, data loss

Consumers and businesses alike are plenty worried about identity theft, and for very good reasons, as indicated by two separate reports on the subject released today.

With the December holidays quickly nearing, vendors and industry organizations are using the month of November to unleash a pre-winter blizzard of survey results around identity theft and tips for coping with the problem, whether you plan to do your shopping online or in brick-and-mortar stores.

Today alone, two survey reports on the topic of identity theft hit the newswires. In questioning its consumer customers, for example, Absolute Software discovered that, when it comes to the prospect of losing their laptops, users are more concerned about identity theft than about either data loss or having unauthorized people access their files.

Absolute - which offers services for tracking and recovering stolen laptops - also talked to its business customers, finding that 62% of them believe more computers have been lost or stolen than people commonly realize.

Laptop theft, of course, is hardly the only method used by identity thieves to capture personal information. In another report issued today, the Identity Theft Resource Center detected a "significant increase" between 2004 and 2006 in information theft over the Internet, though lost and/or stolen wallets, via home/car robberies, and in the workplace.

In the year 2006, respondents estimate the total value of all charges on fraudulent accounts related to theft of their personal information at anywhere from $50 to $500,000. But the total actually averaged $87,303, an increase of 78 percent from 2004, according to the report, which is entitled "Identity Theft: The Aftermath."

Almost two-thirds of the 2006 sample reported that their personal information had been used to open a new credit line in their name. Another 29% that the information was used for obtaining a new cable/utility. A total of 27% maintained that an imposter made changes to their existing credit card accounts.

Also today, TrustedID - the producers of IDFreeze Software - came out with several tips for protecting personal information while shopping online for the holidays, advising consumers to use combinations of letters, numbers and other characters in their passwords; to avoid e-mailing financial or other personal information; and to stop clicking on links in unsolicited e-mails.

In another list of tips issued earlier this month, a nonprofit group called the Identity Theft Resource Center cautioned Web shoppers to make sure an online shopping site is a "secure" site (with an "https" address), and to keep printouts of Web pages describing the item ordered, along with any e-mail messages and contact info for the seller.

And in yet another survey, released earlier in November, ID Analytics, an identity risk management vendor, reviewed ten million identities spanning a dozen different data breaches. Its somewhat surprising finding was that, contrary to what many in the industry have said, there was no evidence that fraudsters misusing the identity information have been "selling the data broadly or distributing it over the Internet."

Instead, the fraudsters examined by ID Analytics have tended to link the personal data to a limited set of new phone numbers or addresses, in efforts to receive credit cards or other merchandise ordered using the breached identity data.