Though Internet-crippling virus attacks now seem to be a thing of the past, PC users didn’t feel a lot more secure in 2006. That’s because online attacks have become more sneaky and professional, as a new breed of financially motivated cyber criminals has emerged as enemy number one. Microsoft patched more bugs than ever and whole new classes of flaws were discovered in kernel-level drivers, office suites and on widely used Web sites. Vendors’ chatter about security is at an all-time high, but the bad guys are still finding lots of places to attack.

December 24, 2006 — If you’re not careful what you throw in your trash, you might be throwing away your most valuable possession: your identity.

In the last two months, police report at least seven complaints from local residents whose trashcans or trash was stolen.

“This is what we commonly refer to as Dumpster diving,” police Sgt. William Dietrich said.

This sort of trash picking can be profitable.

“The suspect will obtain vital financial information by simply digging through trash,” Dietrich said. “It’s become a problem recently in the past three to four years.”

This year alone, there have been about 1,000 cases of identity theft reported to the Brownsville Police Department, Sgt. Jimmy Manrrique said.

In 2001, there were more than 100,000 cases of identity theft in the United States, and that has increased to more than 1 million cases per year, Dietrich said.

“Over a five-year period, more than 27 million consumers were victims of identity theft,” according to a Federal Trade Commission Survey conducted in 2003.

‘Tis the season for eggnog, mistletoe and…cyber crooks? It’s unfortunate, but as consumers become more comfortable with online shopping, cyber crooks are getting better about finding newer, sneakier ways to trick them into passing on personal information for their own gain.

Searching the West Side apartment of an identity-fraud suspect this week, authorities allegedly discovered financial records belonging to 91 Major League Baseball players, including White Sox slugger Jim Thome, former Cubs outfielder Moises Alou and star Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez.

David Dright, 38, of the 5200 block of West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, allegedly plucked discarded–and unshredded–loan applications, tax returns and other private documents earlier this year from a trash bin near the Northbrook offices of SFX Baseball, which negotiates contracts for professional baseball players.

In the second of our four-part series, we look at security in Windows Vista

Microsoft intends Vista to be the most secure version of Windows yet released. Security has been beefed up throughout the operating system, with secure booting, protected data transfer across system buses and enforced driver signing helping to protect the system from attack.

Additionally, Digital Rights Management (DRM) gives copyright owners the ability to protect their digital media from piracy if they wish.

User Account Control
Certainly the most noticeable – and probably the most irritating security measure from the user’s point of view – is the introduction of User Account Control (UAC).

Today, most Windows users are running with default administrator privileges. Home users and anyone who had been using Windows since the days of Windows 3.0 or even Dos will have grown up in an environment where there is only one user on the system, and that user has the power to control, edit – and screw up – anything and everything on the PC.