Articles: Protect yourself from identity theft

As “The bad guys” keep inventing new angles to attack from it is important for us all to approach identity theft pro-actively. Most are probably familiar with the proverb "There is no use use closing the door, once the horse has left the barn".

Most have probably gotten an email that seem to be from an acquaintance but turn out to be a virus sent from someone with your friend added in the address book it stress the importance to be able to authenticate the sender of a message.

To authenticate the sender you would use something referred to as a digital signatures.A digital signature ensures two things: The former is that the sender is whom he claim to be. The latter is that the message was not altered during transmit. To protect your privacy you would also use encryption in order to scramble the message during transmit so that nobody but the intended recipient can read the message.

One solution that provide functionality such as digital signatures and encryption is OpenPGP.

An example of how OpenPGP work is this: You have two kinds of keys for your door at home, one that can lock the door, and one that can unlock the door. You print ten copies of the locking key and give them to your neighbors. If you have left your door open, they are able to lock it, but you are still the only person that can unlock the door.

A free open source implementation of the OpenPGP standard is the GNU Privacy Guard, which is used as the basis for the examples at secure-my-email.com . It can be integrated into the email application itself using a plugin, such as the popular Enigmail plugin for the Mozilla Thunderbird browser, or it can be used as a proxy between the email application and the email server to add support for virtually every email application. If you use webmail you can use a frontend that allow you to operate with the current clipboard or current window.

Below is an example from the popular email user agent Mozilla Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension. Worth to note is that once configured OpenPGP work almost transparently.

More details on how to utilize OpenPGP can be found at secure-my-email.com