10 Most Common Ways Credit Card Numbers Get Stolen Online

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Credit theft online is big business, and business is good. Good enough, in fact, to have supported a thriving international market for resale of stolen credit card numbers for years. How do these profiteering cyber-thieves get these numbers? Let us count the ways.

The following is a list of the ten most common ways that your credit card number is liable to wind up for sale:

1. Phishing – Typically, a nefarious party will send an email that purports to be from a trusted financial institution, using a corporate logo or mock website. The appearance will be authentic enough to lure some recipients into believing that they are corresponding with their own bank, and provide the login, password, or account number information that is requested in the email.
2. Hacking – Experienced hackers can bypass security measures and gain access to confidential databases, including those with personal and financial information of clients or employees.
3. Spyware – Programs such as trojan horses can be used to infiltrate a computer or network,  discover keylogging information, and thus determine login user names and passwords.
4. Unethical Merchants – Online purchases with illicit businesses can result in the sale or unauthorized use of the credit card information you provided when making those purchases.
5. Unattended PC – Occurs when using your device in a public area. Failure to safeguard information on your display, or to log out before walking away from the computer leaves you open to theft.
6. Breach Exploitation – Known weaknesses ( ie. faulty code or open port) in security software can be exploited to gain access to the data that it’s supposed to be protecting.
7. Access Abuse – IT or Admin personnel who have authorized access to sensitive data can abuse such privilege in order to steal personal information.
8. Brute Force Attacks – Weak passwords can be determined by sheer force; that is a simple assault on a login with repeated and numerous combinations of passwords.
9. Social Engineering – There are numerous ways by which an experienced social engineer can obtain information from individuals that would otherwise not be freely accessible or willingly provided to them via conventional means.
10. Social Networking Sites – Used in conjunction with social engineering ploys, the perpetrators can garner a substantial amount of personal information about their mark, thereby gaining a level of trust which they can exploit later on.

While no security software can guarantee 100%  protection, and it’s nigh unto impossible to keep all of your personal information offline, you can still make it as difficult as possible on would-be thieves by following a few simple guidelines:

• Install the best anti-spyware protection available; keep it updated and active.
• Use strong, hard to guess passwords and change them regularly.
• Be careful with whom you do business online.
• Don’t give out password or account information to persons claiming to be bank reps. Genuine customer service representatives will never make such requests.
• The less personal information you share online, the less you risk losing.

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