The Dangers Of IP Identity Theft

Identity theft methods have advanced with technology.  The vast majority of identity theft scams are found lurking on the internet.  One of those common scams you may not have thought about, is IP identity theft.  Your IP or internet protocol, is your computer’s address, and is used to find the location of your computer, as well where you have been online.  Identity thieves are known to steal, and use your IP address, so that anything they do online will appear to have  been done from your computer.

A thief with access to your IP address can force malware and spyware on your computer.  These malicious programs can steal any personal data stored on your computer, giving a thief access to your sensitive info.  A thief can also use your IP address to assume your identity online for fraudulent transactions, or file sharing.  Meaning anybody investigating the ID thief’s crimes will be led to you, because of the use of your IP address.

There are ways to protect against this however.  One method many people turn to are anonymizers, which obscure your computer’s IP address from regular use on web surfing.  Another way is to use a proxy server, which is a website that you use to surf the internet.  By going through a proxy on the internet, you use the proxy server’s IP address, instead of your own.  But these oftentimes are unsafe, as you don’t know who owns the server, so giving out any personal information isn’t advisable, while using a proxy.

If you don’t like the idea of using an anonymizer, instead you can use a firewall to detect a malicious website.  Products like SiteHound and McAfee Site Advisor inform you if a site is malicious, by notifying you when you try to load the webpage.  Malicious sites are automatically blocked before they can access your IP address, or download spyware to your computer.