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Ohio Residents’ Stolen Information at Low Risk of ID Fraud

As the stolen computer tape of Ohio State contained a vast data of personal information, it has inflicted concern among Ohio residents. So has it prompted Governor Ted Strickland into calling briefings almost every day since the theft of the device in the third week of June 2007, as reported by Coshoctontribune.com on June 27, 2007.

ID Analytics has carried out a research on four data intrusions involving 500,000 consumers' personal identification information. It concluded that there is a lot of risk on personal information when the attack targets a specific person or a few people. Such attacks, which are routine occurrences, get no publicity to drive away future probable thieves.

In such a case a single person is a targeted victim in contrast to a big-sized population where the fraudster find it hard to scan through the list, as per Thomas Oscherwitz, VP of govt affairs & San Diego based ID Analytics' chief privacy officer. Insurancejournal published this on June 27, 2007.

When the information finds release, it could be up for sale on the parallel market to overseas people, said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Coshoctontribune.com published it on June 27, 2007.

According to the U.S. FTC, the number of online criminals is increasing along with their sophistication.

For many years, there have been single-incident evidences that identity fraud is a serious problem and it is growing, but now it is a confirmed fact, said Howard Beales, director of the FTC's consumer protection bureau, as reported by Pcsndreams.com.

Identity thieves targeted 1 in 1,000 ids for committing fraud. ID Analytics described the attack an international target. For a smaller set of data individuals are at a greater risk of victimization to ID theft. It was constrained to publish the details of the exploits because of confidentiality reasons, said the company.

But since the personal information was huge that included the names, Social Security numbers of almost 400,000 people, the state employees, taxpayers and other people on the tape have very low chances of data leakage of their identities to fraudsters, experts said.

Related article: Ohio Credit Union Consumers Alerted of a phishing Fraud

» SPAMfighter News - 7/9/2007

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