Inside CRM publishes 50 ways to protect your privacy!

I got a tip from Fiona King at InsideCRM magazine about an article they published that lists fifty tips to protect your privacy, personal and financial information. InsideCRM represents the customer relationship management industry.

The article intended to provide useful tips to protect the average person from fraud, phishing, and all the assorted financial misdeeds facing the average person in today's world. The tips provide information on how these scams originate and emphasize how a person can take back control of their personal and financial information.

The article covers how to protect yourself both on and offline and how you can track your personal information on the Internet. Although I've seen many of these tips before, putting them all in a one-page format makes this article a useful tool. Along with the fifty tips are useful links, which direct the reader to the source material about the particular tip.

The CRM industry has a stake in fighting the battle against scams that are being made easier by technology. Consumer trust is a key factor in any type of business involving customers.
One growing concern that can give the industry a bad rap (even though the legitimate CRM center had nothing to do with it) is a phenomenon called vishing where personal information is stolen by calling people up on the telephone. This type of activity is a growing phenomenon. In most cases, the crooks impersonate a legitimate organization when doing this.

My personal tip on how not to get caught in a vishing expedition is to remember that no reputable organization will ever call (unsolicited by you) and ask for personal or financial information. If this occurs, a red flag should go up in your head and I recommend verifying the number via a known third party source and calling them back. Do not rely on caller ID; spoofing services (which fake caller ID) numbers are available to anyone with the capital to purchase them on the Internet.

The article lists some useful tips when dealing with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, which many believe is the cause in the recent surge of vishing activity. The reason for this is that it has made calling long distance cheap and vishing scams now come from all over the world, making them hard to investigate or trace.

Additionally, CRM centers often deal in personal and financial information. One of the biggest consumer trust issues that faces the industry is when information is breached from within a CRM center. Recent reports of information being stolen at CRM centers have made internal security at CRM centers a priority.

Please note that CRM centers are not the only places personal and financial information are compromised. This is becoming a sad reality and any business that deals in "information" needs to be aware of the potential risks of having this valuable commodity stolen from under their noses.

Most technology scams involve healthy does of social engineering (human trickery) to make them work. Education is the best defense against social engineering and InsideCRM has provided all of us with a valuable tool to do this with!

Symantec warns of newsletters and "legitimate" advertising being hijacked!

Viagra with your Fantasy Football?

Spam is getting worse than ever, and a lot of spam filters don't seem to be stopping it. Even worse, legitimate mail is being designated as "spam" and placed in "bulk folders."

I find myself having to review my "bulk folder," daily.

Symantec is reporting a new "sneaky" spam tactic being seen out there. Legitimate newsletters and advertising from well known organizations, such as Walmart and ESPN are having ads for Viagra (example) inserted into their publications and sent out as if they are affiliated with the product.

In essence, the spammers are "hijacking" legitimate publications.

As reported in the Symantec Security Response blog by Kelly Conley:

We've noticed a tricky new spam tactic occurring recently and thought we'd share it with you. It’s always exciting when a new spamming technique comes along and it’s even more exciting when our filtering capabilities are successful against it. Most users running our product will not have seen this. Spam filtering can still protect you from this “new spam technique,” but, even if you have seen it or even opened it, you probably gave it a one-two glance and wondered “Eh? This isn't what I thought it was.”

The headers are legit – coming from a newsletter or ad that you have signed up for. You should be receiving this mail, right? Nope, it's a spam email. Look closer. There at the top of the page. It's an ad for something entirely different than what you thought was going to be in that email.

Kelly's full post, here.

Symantec's researchers have noted these "faux" (fake) images inserted on legitimate pages, or when the page is accessed - a "pop in" spam message appears moments later. They've also noted that the spammers seem to be able to control how many messages are sent out. No more than one a day is sent to any particular e-mail address -- and a different legitimate newsletter, or retailer is used each time.

According to the researchers, the motivation behind this is to (probably) make the reader more likely to read the message (believe it's credible). This method is possibly also used to in an attempt to trick a lot of the spam filters out there.

The good news is that - according to Kelly - Symantec's filters appear to be catching almost all of this.

A lot of us laugh at spammers and their "seemingly ridiculous" advertising, but the sad truth is, they wouldn't be sending it out if unless some people were falling for it. And that person might be one of your grandparents, or "younger relatives."

Even worse, the products they are "hawking" are questionable and in some instances, dangerous. In addition to this, spam is also used as a means to hook "victims" into all the various Internet scams that I frequently write about.

Symantec covers this issue "online fraud" (and others) on their blog, here.

Screenshot (below) of Kohl's ad being hijacked to sell drugs