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.

The truth is, you are the key component in protecting yourself from phishing attempts. Being smart, web savvy, and even leery about requests for personal information that show up in your inbox can help keep you protected.

In addition, there are sophisticated, spam-protection applications and appliances that can eliminate the bulk of the work for you by “sniffing out” phishy emails and preventing them from reaching your inbox.

The benefits of spam protection are two fold. Flagging and quarantining potentially dangerous email will make checking your email a more pleasant experience, and removing spam from your inbox can reduce the potential for having your identity ruined.

To learn more about FireHost’s unrivaled spam protection and other online security services, visit our secure web hosting add-ons page.

While the national economy suffers, the one run by identity thieves in the dark corners of the Internet isn’t hurting. In fact, demand and prices for stolen credit cards, Social Security numbers and other private information remain stable. The supply of confidential data is steady too, thanks to the way the recession has inspired new scams targeting people who are worried about work and their finances.

Alfred Huger, vice president of Symantec Security Response affirms, “There’s no pricing pressure at all — it’s not dropping, they’re not negotiating down, and that tells us that there are still the same number of buyers. The underground economy has not been affected by the recession.”

If the strength of the information theft economy doesn’t upset you, the meager price for which your personal information is exchanged should:

• Stolen credit card number, $0.06 – $30
• Access to a hijacked email account, $0.10 – $100
• Bank account credentials, $10 -$1,000 and scammers can reportedly cash out your bank account for 8%-50% of the amount they’re stealing!

The pipeline for stolen data is being replenished by phony “phishing” e-mails that are becoming more common as the economy worsens. In fact, Symantec has seen a startling 66 percent increase in the number of phishing Web sites in the last year.

Even if your identity hasn’t been compromised, you are probably feeling the affect of of these phisihing attempts on your inbox. Securing your email accounts with enterprise, level spam-stopping email protection can help protect your identity.

Click here to learn more about FireHost’s enterprise, level email solutions and spam protection.

FireHost wins and retains hosted email clients because we do a very effective job of scanning all incoming email for viruses and spam, then preventing any infectious or offensive messages from reaching your inbox. Comparing our hosted email service to competitors, we should be satisfied knowing that we provide unrivaled anti-spam and virus protection, but we’re not. We’ve taken hosted email one step further and built a better email “mousetrap”.

Effective today, every FireHost email customer’s service has been upgraded to our shiny, new, redundant email environment. <Non-technical readers should skip to paragraph 4. The bullets below will really only be interesting to “geeks”.>

• FireHost configures your domain with our Dallas facility as the primary mail exchange (MX) record, and we’ve made a secondary, backup MX record for your email in our Scottsdale, AZ data center.
• Should the Dallas data center become unavailable for any reason, your incoming and outgoing email will be routed to and queued in the Scottsdale facility until Dallas comes back online.
• At that point, all queued email is delivered to you or your recipient’s inbox.

We’ve taken this extra step to ensure you never miss a message because we recognize that missing an important email is more than just annoying and embarrassing. It costs you business! Continuing our commitment to be your secure web hosting provider, FireHost is redefining the standard for hosted email service providers by squelching the potential for losing email due to service outages.

If you have any questions at all about the changes to your current email service, please contact Sales so we may find out more about how to fulfill your email needs.