Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
time before you realize the anticipated services or goods are not go
ing to materialize. At that time, you might first contact the company
for clarification—although this might be impossible if the business
disappeared. In many cases of fraud, you would not notice an irreg
ularity until reviewing your monthly creditcard statement, and
your only recourse may be to report the problem to your creditcard
company.
Although this review of the risks of plastic credit cards may
seem familiar, it is important to realize that of the scenarios de
scribed, only physical theft of your card is impossible using the
Internet. Your plastic does not physically leave your presence dur
ing a creditcard transaction over the Internet, so it therefore cannot
lead to the physical theft of your card. On the other hand, each of
the other types of abuse is possible. Let's consider each of these al
ternatives in more detail.
online?
As we have noted, your creditcard information is open to any
one watching the Ethernet cable if it were sent through the Internet
without encryption. Even with encryption, however, theft of your
creditcard information is still possible; the data could be obtained
from your machine before encryption takes place. For example,
someone might install a keyboard sniffer on your computer—an
unauthorized program that records each key you type. The sniffer
monitors your keyboard before computer processing performs the
encryption, so your credit card numbers and other information are
available directly as you type. When a sniffer program finds a pat
tern that looks like a credit card, it may record the number or send
it over the Internet to an accomplice site. Because sniffer problems
usually arise because someone had unauthorized access to your
computer, your best defense against them is to carefully control who
has access to your machine and to keep track of what programs are
in place.
Another, less clandestine way that your creditcard information
could be obtained is if you ask your browser to record data you type
into forms. As a convenience, many browsers offer to monitor what
