Data monitoring bill for secured digital info

Digital monitoring could help prevent access to your sensitive information; like debit card numbers.

12:26 29 May 2013

The recent news that the data bill might get pushed through means that digital information will be accessible by the people who need the information in order to combat terrorist attacks or other issues.

Instituting such a bill might also open the door to further protection against cybercrime that focuses on obtaining people’s credit card and debit card information.

Here are a few ways such a bill might be able to protect your credit card and debit card and other sensitive digital data:

• Phishing emails - these emails are intended to work on multiple levels. First, they are used as a means to verify if the email is a legitimate email. If you respond to the email the person can receive information that is useful and can sell your email address. Even if you don’t respond, they will know if it is a legitimate email address because they won’t receive an error.

Secondly, if you happen to reply to requests for any information such as passwords, credit card or debit card numbers and PINs they are able to sell that information, or use it themselves. A bill for digital monitoring might allow this type of activity to be prevented.

• Fake websites - some websites look exactly like the one you intend to visit, but aren’t the real ones. Most of the time duplicate websites will try to get you to “login” to something like your banking account so they get your login ID and password, and then can access your other information like credit card, debit card, and account numbers.

Usually these are done by clicking on links in an email which looks legitimate. When in doubt just go directly to the webpage and don’t worry about using the link.

• Hacking - we’re all familiar with this term to some extent and if you store your passwords, credit card numbers, and debit card numbers in digital files on your computer it can be compromised by a hacker, though the probability is pretty low for your personal computer.

It’s much higher for businesses that have thousands of debit card and credit card numbers sitting in their system. Digital monitor might allow such activity to be detected before servers are compromised.