Your life in their hands
Guard yourself against identity theft
Mar 23rd 2007
From Economist.com

Excerpt: "What to do to protect your identity? First off, change your passwords regularly—especially if you bank online or store personal information on a laptop that gets toted around and can be easily stolen.

Freeze your credit record. No one can open a line of credit against your account without access to your credit record.

Freeze your credit record. No one can open a line of credit against your account without access to your credit record. That way you will also put paid to all those tiresome (and potentially dangerous) offers of pre-approved credit cards.

Be especially leery of e-mail messages purporting to be from banks, stores or government agencies that ask for personal information. Never, ever respond to an e-mail request to verify your account number or password. Legitimate companies just don’t ask for such things as a matter of principle.

Protect your computer from viruses, spyware and other forms of malware. Always use a firewall plus an anti-virus program and a couple of anti-spyware packages, and set them to update themselves automatically. Before buying anything online, check your browser’s status bar for a locked padlock symbol. Look also in the address bar and make sure it is using the secure form of the hypertext transport protocol (ie, “https” rather than the insecure “http”).

Finally, buy a paper shredder. That will discourage dumpster divers from fishing out pre-approved credit-card offers from your rubbish bin. It could be the best $20 you’ll ever spend." the rest