identity

Recently, the General Services Administration sent an e-mail alert to users of its System for Award Management (SAM), reporting that a security vulnerability exposed the users' names, taxpayer identification numbers (TINs), marketing partner information numbers, and bank account information to "[r]egistered SAM users with entity administrator rights and delegated entity registration rights."

The notice warned that "[r]egistrants using their Social Security Numbers instead of a TIN for purposes of doing business with the federal government may be at greater risk for potential identity theft." Also provided was a link to a page on the agency's site … Read more

Identity thieves are more active than ever. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 2 million consumer complaints overall, and for the 13th consecutive year, identity theft was the most-common complaint category: 369,132 ID-theft reports were added to the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network in the year, an increase of more than 30 percent from 2011.

Last week the FTC released its 2012 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book (PDF). According to the report, the fastest-growing category of identity theft relates to government documents and benefits: complaints in this category increased 46 percent from calendar-year 2010. Credit-card fraud (… Read more

While cyberattacks and hacking seem to be constantly making headlines these days, identity fraud is also on the rise.

A new report by Javelin Strategy and Research shows that identity fraud has increased for the last three years in a row -- affecting more than 5 percent of U.S. adults. In 2012, 12.6 million people were identity victims.

According to Javelin, identity fraud is up 4.9 percent from 2011 and 4.35 percent from 2010. The firm said that scammers are increasingly gaining access to people's personal information and accounts through data breaches and malware attacks.… Read more

Your IP address gives advertisers, your ISP and even the police tons of information about you. If you want to hide your surfing behavior, Easy-Hide-IP can issue you a new IP address whenever you want a change. It helps you stay anonymous on the Web, but isn't a totally comprehensive solution like a VPN or more powerful proxy.

Despite touting easy setup, the download takes longer than most because of registration. You have to give up your email address and then wait for a product key before you can start using the program. Then, if you want more than … Read more

MorphVOX Pro is a voice changer application with sound effects and background tracks built in. (There is a free application called MorphVOX Junior from the same publisher if you want to evaluate the software.) The MorphVOX Pro software is aimed at those who want to communicate online either with a change in voice characteristics, or with different effects applied. The $39.99 software installs easily.

The MorphVOX Pro has two interfaces. The Studio interface is divided into five panes, one each for selecting preconfigured voices (Goblin, Shade, Cyborg, etc), pitch and timbre controls, sound effects, voice effects and a graphic … Read more

The 2013 updates to the Kaspersky protection suites bring to consumers some of the most advanced security technology currently available. It involves introducing an exploit prevention engine as part of the security suite, but also a Safe Money banking protection tool that you can interact directly with. The suite's scans aren't the fastest, but it definitely will protect you.

Installation Installing Kaspersky has been dramatically simplified over the past two years. Following on 2012's fuss-free install, the installer for 2013 will remove conflicting security programs and any detected malware automatically.

You're still on the hook for … Read more

Zappos, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Yahoo, LastFm, the Environmental Protection Agency, Stanford, and Columbia University -- all suffered online data breaches recently, says the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

In fact, this year alone, there have been 276 data breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Statistics indicate that private sector businesses and the health-care industry were most vulnerable, falling victim to, respectively, 37 percent and 34 percent of the breaches. Educational institutions and the government/military sector had breach rates of 14 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The rate for financial companies came in at just more than 3 percent, according to … Read more

YouTube is now encouraging video uploaders to use their real names. Is this the first sign of what's to come? Will our anonymity on YouTube become a thing of the past?

For now, users still have the option to opt out of disclosing their true identity, but a world in which YouTube videos are no longer anonymously uploaded appears much closer to reality than ever before. Of course we've seen things like this before. Most of us seem to have no problem giving away our personal information to Facebook, right? … Read more

YouTube thinks that maybe all those cutepuppies99 and origamiboys1981 might be ready to grow up. Google's online video platform is now giving users the option to start using their real names on its service, along with hooking up their Google Plus profile up with their YouTube channel.

"One Google-wide identity was something that proved popular with new YouTube users when we began offering it in March, so we are now extending it to existing users," YouTube software engineer John Fisher wrote in a recent blog post.

Here's more on how Fisher describes how it works: