Gordon Smith reports:
People posting apparently innocuous information on social networking sites could leave themselves open to identity theft, a computer security conference heard this week.
Presenting a keynote address at the RSA conference in London, People Security’s chief security strategist Hugh Thompson said that while posting on social networks has grown, “there hasn’t been a commensurate education about what information we should be sharing”.
[…]
In another presentation at the conference, Brian Honan, an Irish information security consultant, explained how he was able to obtain a journalist’s birth certificate using only information that was freely available online.
A wish-list on Amazon.com revealed a potential address, while the US website Pownce.com openly displayed her date of birth.
The challenge was undertaken with the journalist’s consent but Mr Honan said it showed how a determined attacker could cause a lot of damage.
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