Do not be a Victim of Social Engineering

In the past few months, not only was Monster.com attacked but also was Ameritrade. In both situations most of the information that was reported stolen by these companies were names and email addresses, not extremely confidential information but, a starting place for scammers out there that would love to steal your identity. In the case of Ameritrade, they found out their database has been breached by a few of their customers because they had received junk mail they felt was unusual to be receiving and reported it to the company. Once Ameritrade investigated it, they determined there was a breach in to their database exposing information about 6.3 million clients.
It is very important now for customers to be aware of the type of emails they get from Ameritrade and do not give out any additional information about themselves in these emails. In most cases, the cyber thieves will be trying to send phishing emails that look very real and will be trying to get the recipients of these emails to provide personal information to be used to try to steal their identity for the thieves’ individual use or to sell to others and make money. Ameritrade should be advising their clients never to give out personal information via emails but if they have not advised their clientele of these standards the client themselves needs to be very careful and call Ameritrade directly if they feel something is not right. Social engineering is very difficult to stop and anybody is capable of social engineer because it does not require technical knowledge so as the consumer you must be aware and careful to protect yourself against a social engineering attack.