﻿ Online fraud and identity theft ﻿ ﻿

Online fraud and identity theft

Fraud is described as wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. Online fraud can be defined as the use of internet services or software with internet access to defraud victims or to otherwise take advantage of them.

In other words it is traditional fraud, but with the internet as the means of carrying out the fraud.

Like its traditional counterpart, online fraud can take many forms. Action Fraud, which is the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and internet crime lists a total of 30 recognized types of online fraud.

These include: account takeover, advance fee frauds, bank card and cheque fraud, charity donation fraud, domain name scams, holiday fraud, internet auction fraud, mass marketing scams etc. Phishing is a form of online fraud.

Identity theft is a very specific form of online fraud. Identity theft is the crime of obtaining the personal or financial information of another person for the sole purpose of assuming that person's name or identity in order to make transactions or purchases.

Phishing emails are a common means of acquiring the details to carry out the identity theft.

Individuals can protect themselves from online fraud or identity theft by:

· Not giving any personal information to anyone before verifying their credentials.

· Not responding to emails asking them to click on a link and confirm bank details. Banks do not update data in this way.

· Destroying and preferably shredding receipts with your card details on or mail containing name and address.

· Making sure their computer has up-to-date anti-virus software and a firewall installed.

· Ensuring their browser is set to the highest level of security notification.

Denial of service (DoS) attacks

A DoS attack is an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a network resource from using that service. The classic DoS attack will come from a single computer sending multiple requests to that resource.

There are two general forms of DoS attacks:

· attacks with crash services

· attacks with flood services


Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS)

It has become common practice for extortionists to target internet firms and threaten to cripple their websites with deluges of data unless they pay a ransom. These are known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and they overwhelm servers with requests until they are forced offline.

Computers from all over the world are innocently recruited to take part in the attack, each sending only a small part of the entire data flood. The recruiting of machines to take part in attacks is typically done by infecting them with a virus, Trojan horse or worm.

The IP address of compromised machines – called zombies or bots – is sent back to the criminal, who will use it to launch a DDoS. The network of zombie machines is sometimes known as a Botnet.

Ex. 2. Answer the questions.

1) What software is called malicious?

2) What does spyware do?

3) What is phishing?

4) What are software products from reputable companies, where you will be viewing sponsored advertisements until a commercial fee is paid, known as?

5) Which malicious activity is equally as dangerous for large corporations as it is for the individual user?

6) What is identity theft?

7) What should you do to prevent online fraud?

8) What is the name given to a computer on the Internet which has been compromised by a hacker with a view to be used in a DDoS?

9) What name is given to the group of compromised computers which are used in a DDoS?

10) Which actions are carried out on a compromised computer in a DDoS attack?

Ex. 3. Summarize the content of the paper.

Ex. 4. Speak about the problem of security in computer technologies.

Text 6

Ex. 1. Read and translate the text.

Internet of Things

Internet of Things is defined as the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data: if one thing can prevent the Internet of things fromtransformingthe way we live and work, it will be abreakdownin security.















“Today computers – and, therefore, the Internet – are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code.



The term is somewhat synonymous with the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoE is based on the idea that in the future, Internet connections will not be restricted to laptop or desktop computers and a handful of tablets, as in previous decades. Instead, machines will generally become smarter by having more access to data and expanded networking opportunities.


IoE features fall under two main categories:

· Input: Allows analog or external data to be put into a piece of hardware.

· Output: Allows a piece of hardware to be put back into the Internet.


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