What is Identity Theft and how to get protected?

If you visiting web regularly and have read news then you may hear the word Identity Theft, which usually means that somebody use trick to fool you and use your personal information for their own financial gain.

As written in Wikipedia:

Identity theft is a term used that is to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits. The term dates to 1964[1] and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it. The person whose identity is used can suffer various consequences when he or she is held responsible for the perpetrator's actions. In many countries specific laws make it a crime to use another person's identity for personal gain.

The cyber criminal usually use a technique which known as phishing to exploit users identity. The cyber thief sends an e-mail that look like genuine and send from reputable site (mostly from financial institutions like eBay, PayPal etc.), telling you there is a problem with your account or you already buy some thing and need to clear the delivery.

The e-mail will ask you to on a link in the e-mail, and you are taken to a site that looks exactly like that of your bank or payment system of that legitimate website. There, they will ask you to fill out again your Social Security or credit card numbers, and/or other confidential numbers which later will be used by the cyber criminals to access your accounts for their own financial gain and your financial as well as social lose.

Another method is, cyber criminal send an attachment with those email instead of links and whenever you use that attachment or download a file from given link, it will put a spyware on your system to spy on you and collect your activity details which later send to those criminals silently by installed tools. A good security effort only able to protect anyone from this. I already share some basic tips on computer security which may come handful here.

Advice:

1. Always do business on legitimate and well known online shop.

2. Always check email domain and check link twice before clicking.

3. Visit your site via bookmark or using your favorite search engine. Never visit it using untrusted source.