Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft

Do you know how to protect your vital identity information when you use computers for your banking, credit card transactions, and everyday purchases? What about when you are using email, web surfing, texting, or social networking? You'll learn about these in Twelve Steps to Avoid Identity Theft.
What do all these companies, organizations, and people have in common?
- Heartland
- RBS Worldpay
- Citizens Financial Group Inc
- Hannaford Brothers Co
- TJX Companies Inc
- Marshalls
- TJ Maxx
- CardSystems Solutions
- The U.S. Internal Revenue Service
- Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
- Wyndam Worldwide Corporation (Wyndam hotels)
- Zappos
- Sony's online accounts for Play Station users
- Verisign
- LinkedIn

The sad answer is that all of them have suffered well-publicized recent successful attacks from identity thieves. Many of these attacks involved thieves obtaining access to confidential financial information from thousands, and in some cases, millions, of customers.
How can you protect yourselves from this crime? In this book we describe 12 1/2 suggestions that can strongly reduce, or even eliminate, the likelihood of you being an identity theft victim. Why 12 1/2 steps? Because twelve of the steps are ones that you can begin to take right away, and the other will require you to do some additional work reading up on this vital topic.
Here are the twelve and a half simple steps to help avoid identity theft:
1. Strip to a bare minimum
2. Don't Pameiob
3. Be strong
4. Watch for zombies
5. Watch for vampires
6. Free is too costly
7. Don't give too much credit
8. Surf safely
9. Gullible's travels
10. Don't give it up if you don't have to
11. Just the FAX, please
12. Be shrewd and shred
12 1/2. Get more information

This short, easy-to-understand book, intended for the general, non-specialist reader, will tell you what to do and what to avoid when going to a bank, pharmacy, or doctor; shopping in person; traveling; or using any kind of electronic commerce. You'll learn about the most common security weaknesses of modern banking and e-commerce software and when to avoid using certain software systems, the tell-tale signs of potentially insecure transmission of your data, and how to avoid the dangerous practice of "Pameiob." You'll learn how you have to protect yourself from the kinds of identity theft that can occur even if YOU never do any online shopping.

This book is a brief, easy-to-understand guide that is dedicated to keeping your assets and identity safe while navigating this dangerous world. The book is based on the author's experiences as a long-term identity theft consultant and lecturer and computer scientist.

Want more detailed information on identity theft? Then "Identity Theft in the Cyber Age" is the book for you.

Ronald J. Leach recently retired as Professor and Chair Emeritus from the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, where he had taught since 1969. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park and the M. S. degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include distributed systems, performance modeling and capacity planning; and most areas of software engineering, especially software reuse, fault-tolerance, and software performance measurement and their empirical foundations. Some of his current work includes the application of computing to the social sciences, especially in the area of name matching within historical documents, using both his computer search skills and genealogical knowledge. He is a frequent member of ABET site visit teams. He is an experienced cruise ship lecturer, with special emphasis on identity theft and computer forensics. He also lectures to other groups.

Ron Leach is the author of seven print books: "Using C in Software Design," Academic Press Professional,"Advanced Topics in UNIX," John Wiley; "Object-Oriented Design and Programming in C++," Academic Press Professional, Software Reuse: Methods, Models, and Costs," McGraw-Hill, "Introduction to Software Engineering," CRC Press, "Genealogy for the Information Age," Disruptive Publishing, and "Relative Genealogy," Disruptive Publishing. He has published two books on the subject of identity theft: "Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft," as an ebook, and "Identity Theft in the Cyber Age," which is available as both an ebook and in print. Revised editions of many of these are available as ebooks.

Dr. Leach has offered technical training and seminars on software reuse, reengineering, and testing on three continents. He has lectured on a variety of other topics between continents! He is also the author or co-author of more than one hundred technical papers. In his spare time, he is the co-Editor of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal and is webmaster for its newly designed website.