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Does your wallet contain enough information about you for someone to steal your identity and commit crimes under your name? That’s what happened to Jessamyn Lovell when Erin Hart stole her wallet in 2011.

Hart shoplifted, checked into hotels and rented cars in Lovell’s name. Of all the nerve.

Lovell tracked Hart down and documented this in “Dear Erin Hart,” a photo project. Lovell couldn’t find the heartless Hart on her own, so she hired a private investigator. Turns out Hart was sitting in jail o

Two Fundamental Paradigms

In spite of the enormous proliferation of competing schemes in the business strategy literature, there are two fundamental paradigms that have emerged as the most influential in the last two decades. First, Competitive Positioning, as proposed by Michael Porter from the Harvard Business School in the 1980’s, and, second, the Resource-Based View of the firm that evolved during the 1990’s.

Porter’s arguments are drawn from the work of organizational economists who place the

If you’ve ever watched virtually any spy flick or James Bond movie you’re familiar with “bugs” – those little dime-sized metallic things that the bad guys would secretly stick under someone’s desk to record any conversation in the room—picked up by a receiver in their car. Or, the phone was “tapped” – the device was inside the receiver.

How primitive! Because these days, all of your computer, mobile, tablet and online activities can be “bugged” – without someone ever coming into your home or offi

Question: No. 1 reason people get a home security system?

Answer: Recently burglarized; The majority of the people I hear from who want to install a home security system were recently burglarized. It often takes adversity or even tragedy for us to wake up to the realities of a harsh world.

Of course, even for people who’ve never been victims of a robbery, prevention of a burglary or home invasion is a top reason people get home security systems.

Home burglary is a very common crime. But deterring b

It’s amazing how ingenious cybercriminals are, but the victims also need to take some responsibility for falling for these ruses, especially when the victim is a business that has failed to train its employees in cybersecurity measures.

Ransomware

The stuff of science fiction is here: Who would have ever thought there’d ever be a such thing as criminals remotely stealing someone’s personal information (word processing files, any kind of image, etc.), scrambling it up via encryption, then demanding

Sixty different materials go into the printing of a U.S. passport. That little booklet of a thing contains up to 30 pieces of security—and you can’t see most of them. And good luck trying to get details on these security features.

The author of an article on gizmodo.com points out that he tried to get specifics from Homeland Security, but that the “forensic lab’s experts couldn’t discuss the security.” The author then sought answers from passport and forgery experts.

Holograms

When you see or hear

Privacy used to mean changing clothes behind a partition. Nowadays, say “privacy” and people are likely to think in terms of cyberspace. Stay connected, and you risk losing your privacy.

Even if you’re not connected, don’t even own a computer or smartphone, information about you can still be out there on the Internet, such as a listing for your address and phone number or a way for someone to get it with a small fee if you live in owner-occupied property.

An article on wired.com points out that th

The old TV show “Star Trek” has and episode where Spock is telling Kirk of a human flaw called intuition. Spock was all about analysis and logic, while Kirk often relied upon intuition to solve problems. Intuition is a complex human sense that isn’t entirely understood or even believed to be real by some. Some call it mothers intuition or women’s intuition. But I believe everyone has it even though some don’t know how to properly cultivate it for their benefit.

Intuition vs. Analysis

A Rice Univer

I know someone who tried to make a hotel reservation over the phone. She goes by the name “Kelcie,” but her birth name is Frances. She hates her birth name. When making the reservation she used the name Kelcie, which is what’s on her credit card and checks, but her driver’s license says Frances.

She was told that when she arrived, she’d need to present a photo ID. She asked if there’d be any problem since her driver’s license said Frances and the reservation said Kelcie. She was told most definit

Who needs guns, threatening notes to rob a bank when you can do it with just your fingertips inside your home?

A hacking ring in the eastern portion of Europe may be the most successful team of bank robbers to date, having purportedly robbed $1 billion from multiple banks. This can only be done by infecting computers with malicious software (malware) and sucking out all the money.

Obviously, these hackers aren’t dumb criminals, but they also play on poor security measures of the banks. Apparently,

The RIMS Risk Management Society (LogicManager’s co-author for the RIMS Risk Maturity Model) promotes the adoption of Risk Committees for organizations looking to formalize their enterprise risk management processes.

With more organizations adopting risk committees or similar governance groups, the question remains: What should risk managers present to their risk committee; or conversely, what should risk committees ask that their managers present to them?

Forrester Research, in their report on me

What is catphishing? It certainly isn’t Garfield lazily sitting in a canoe holding a fishing rod. Catphishing is when a fraudster fabricates an identity and tricks someone via cyber communication into a phony emotional or romantic relationship—usually for financial gain to the scammer—because eventually he’ll hit the victim up for money.

But another reason for catphishing is to lure someone into having a “relationship” with the scammer—to either ultimately publically humiliate them with this info

It’s been said that there are over a million different apps for the smartphone. Well, however many may exist, know that not all of them are passing security tests with flying colors.

You may already be a user of at least several of the 25 most downloaded apps And what’s so special about the top 25? 18 of them flunked a security test that was given by McAfee Labs™ this past January. And they flunked the test four months after their developers had been notified of these vulnerabilities.

App creators

You wouldn’t have to worry about privacy issues on Facebook if you didn’t post sensitive, private information on Facebook…such as information that one day can be used against you. And really, you should share only what you consider “professional” information, even with family. Just stop with the nonsense.

At any rate, it’s important to know how to use Facebook’s privacy features, which change from time to time. Here are useful tips.

1. Go to Start, then Account, then Privacy Settings, then Edit Your

One of the arguments against being very virtually social is that nobody is SO important that everyone wants to know, for instance, that this person is going to be at the local sports bar watching the Super Bowl (or almost nobody; sad to say, some celebrities have half the world following them).

Another argument, however, against tweeting and posting your every move is that this tells burglars when you’ll be away from your house.

So, you’re important enough to post every detail of your life on Face

Who’d ever think that 50 years ago, your money was safer in your bank account than it is today in this “modern” age: remote theft. If you bank with a large or small bank, your account may be at risk by hacking rings.

However, most of the time, but not always, if your account is drained by a cyber thief, the bank will cover it for you.

The latest information is that a big attack is planned in the spring, but it’s the “It’s easier to get one dollar from a million people than it is to get a million b

This article from the Wharton University of Pennsylvania titled Confidence Games: Why People Don’t Trust Machines to Be Right highlights the issue of placing trust in our own judgement even though the facts tell us otherwise.

In the article, Wharton professor Cade Massey and doctoral student Berkeley Dietvorst explain that once we use a predictive algorithm that makes a mistake, most of us no longer trust it.  We would prefer our own judgement even though the facts point to the algorithm being ri