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CybAlert Social Media Password Improvement Hint 4

For those of us who perceive that our credit reports and profiles are not for sale... you are greatly mistaken.

When you apply for employment, there is a high liklihood you will be giving your prospective employer the right to secure your credit report.

The credit report contains practically every financial and employment event in your adult life... and possibly before you became an adult.

The credit report may contain every address you ever resided and every post office box you ever rented and any place you may have lived temporarily.

If you had the misfortune of being sued, there is the likelihood the plaintiff hired an investigator and that investigator purchased your credit report.

In the body of the filing the plaintiff will most likely include information about you that was extracted from a credit report. The interesting part is that once published in a law suit filing, all that information is now public for any hacker to download.

So you may think so what... the credit report doesn't have complete account numbers... what is a bad guy going to do?

We are going to share with you what the bad guy does:

- Many of us use our names as our userID... some use the last name... or a combination of first and last name... Hmmm... this is on the credit report or law suit filing...

- Many of us use a street address that we most vividly remember from our past.. "1 Main St." The bad guy can find that address on the credit report information

- Many of us use the last 4 digits of our social security number as part of our userID or password. Guess what is on the credit report

- Many of us use our spouse or childrens first names in userID and password... Those are on the credit report... or on those sites that find peopel

Getting back to those employer obtained credit reports... that we were so willing to provide authorization... because we wanted the job...

Well in many cases, those credit reports are delivered in electronic formats. Guess what the bad guys hunt for when they gain access to an enterprise....

The bad guys try to gain access to Human Resources and Payroll files... Why ? Because the Human Resource and Payroll files contain full social security numbers, often poorly secure logins and passwords, those credit reports are stored electronically... and associated to the employee record... and what does that employee record have ? Full name... address for W-2... Full social security numbers... date of birth... and so forth

While we do want that job... keep in mind that we you give that prospective employer the ability to source your credit report... you are opening your web and banking world to the hackers.

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