Posts Tagged ‘Identity Theft’

Four Million British Identities for Sale

by FireHost Evangelist on July 21st, 2009

britishIDs2

There are four million British identities for sale according to a weekend story from the UK’s Times Online. The compromised data contains highly sensitive, personal financial information like credit card details, bank account numbers, and PIN’s, and it’s all available to the highest bidder.

You may be wondering how such a large bounty of confidential information was collected, and what organization is responsible for the massive data breach. The startling answer is that no one is directly responsible for the leak; it appears everyday email users like you divulged their digits to these hackers.

“Most of the personal data has been gathered as a result of phishing. Unsuspecting victims hand over the information by e-mail to people posing as reputable sources such as banks or online stores. Other data has been stolen after criminals infect a person’s personal computer with viruses and then raid it for information,” the story states.

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Are you at risk of a cross-site scripting attack?

by FireHost Evangelist on April 28th, 2009

xss-threat3In basic terms, cross-site scripting (XSS) is a popular method of attacking a website’s application vulnerabilities by injecting target websites with malicious code. The goal is typically to embed a program which steals data, leading to credit card or identity theft. During these attacks, affected websites appear perfectly normal to visitors, who continue to use the website as they normally would.

Consider this example:

Mary frequently visits an online shopping website. One day, hackers use a cross-site scripting attack on the website, embedding malicious code. Mary returns to the website and buys a pair of new shoes, unknowingly passing her confidential information to hackers. Before she realizes what happened, someone has stolen her identity and ruined her credit.

Every business owner has more important things to do than mitigate a very public theft of your customer’s personal data, so make securing your customer data a priority today.

Unfortunately for consumers and businesses, many hosting providers don’t take effective measures to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks on their clients. If your hosting provider doesn’t address cross-site scripting attacks (XSS) properly, your company’s website could easily fall prey to hackers and expose your customer’s personal information.

Security is the primary focus at FireHost. We pride ourselves on providing industry-leading secure hosting, which includes a WAF to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS). This hardware security device stops hackers from exploiting web applications, securing your website, business, and customers from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

To discover more about our secure hosting and prevention of cross-site scripting (XSS), contact a FireHost Agent today.