Email Identity Theft - Guarding Your Web Words

Unlike the locked up laptop on the right, it is harder to prevent your email identity from being stolen. Email identity theft involves the fraudulent use of your email address for phishing or spamming. The usual victim of email identity theft is a commercial enterprise. Email identity theft is perpetrated for two purposes - to convince others that they are legitimate firms that have legitimate reasons for asking for people's financial information such as bank access, credit card numbers and so forth. This is phishing.

The second purpose behind email identity theft is for spamming. The most common of the ISPs and email providers have spam blockers. If, however, someone perpetrating email identity theft sends an email to an individual or firm under the guise of someone that person or firm knows the message will not be blocked.

Here are some tips on email identity theft prevention.

The first suggestion for prevention of email identity theft is to use a DNS service supplier or domain registrar not related to your Web host company. This is useful to prevent your being blocked on the Web if someone passes themselves off as you and commits phishing or spamming expeditions.

You might want to take this one step further and keep a second copy of your site as a hot backup from a second server and host provider. If the first host company fails you can switch quickly.

Shorten your Time to Live (TTL) settings, which will limit your DNS records lifetime. The longer your cached copies of the DNS records are available the longer users can be directed to the fraudulent site.

If you can, choose a host that gives you an IP address that is not shared. If you share your address and the other sites are victims of email identity theft, you could be shut down when they are.

Finally, if you are a consumer and receive an email from a bank or what seems a legitimate business, never click on the link in the email. Manytimes these will take you to sites that may look ligitimate, but are set up to try to dup you into providing a user name, password, and worse yet, credit card information or other personally identifiable information. So, instead, go to your browser and hand type in the URL of your bank or other business. If you ever have any doubt, just wait until business hours and call the company that supposedly sent you the email to determine the legitimaticy. Never transact business with people or companies you don't know and can't verify.