ID theft isn’t always digital

I’ve always said “The "SAFEST” computer is the one that is never built”.  That’s because there is always “the physical” security issue.  A doctor’s office might have all the digital security measures in place…but what about the employees (I’m not picking on the medical field…just using it as an example).  What about a real-estate office that helped you purchase your new home…what personal info do they have at the office…in paper format?  If someone “lifted” it, would anyone notice?  Just this week I got an email from an online video service (traveling I enjoy watching movies on my Note2).  Here’s what the email said:

Dear Dale,
We want to let you know that there was a break-in at the VUDU offices on March 24, 2013, and a number of items were stolen, including hard drives.
Our investigation thus far indicates that these hard drives contained customer information, including names, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, account activity, dates of birth and the last four digits of some credit card numbers. It's important to note that the drives did NOT contain full credit card numbers, as we do not store that information. Additionally, please note if you have never set a password on the VUDU site and have only logged in through another site, your password was not on the hard drives.
While the stolen hard drives included VUDU account passwords, those passwords were encrypted. We believe it would be difficult to break the password encryption, but we can't rule out that possibility given the circumstances of this theft. So we think it's best to be proactive and ask that you be proactive as well.

Interesting enough, my wife discovered (while doing her weekly “check all accounts” routine) that someone had opened a PennyTalk account with her name and used one of her credit cards, (which she very seldom uses) which resulted in almost $100 in charges.  She quickly called both the credit card company and PennyTalk (their investigation showed that someone in New Mexico (or least the area code of 505) was responsible, and they were calling someone in Uganda.  The credit

So lesson for this week…Be aware that your info isn’t JUST digital….and check your accounts (bank, credit card, etc) OFTEN!!! :-)

-SuperDale