The SmartSwipe Online Security, Shopping and Technology Blog

I have some exciting news - NetSecure Technologies has a booth at RSA 2010 in San Francisco. So, if you are in San Francisco and plan on attending RSA, drop by booth 236 and say hello to our crew there.

To celebrate RSA, we launched http://www.dynamic-ssl.com. Most of the content on this new site is already on smartswipe.ca, but it is nice having our own place online.

Phonebusters published some interesting information on their web site and I thought that I should share it with all of you. They released their statistics for December 2009 and those stats include a snapshot of the year in identity theft. Those statistics seem to indicate that fewer people fell victim to identity theft, but the average loss was much greater.

In 2008, 11,511 reported being the victims of identity theft. These people were victimized out of a total of $9,697,199.05. In 2009, only 11,135 people reported being the victims of identity theft but they lost a total of $10,993, 348.72. If you do the math, this means that in 2009, the average identity theft victim lost $987.28.

I have some great news from world swipe quarters - SmartSwipe version 1.7.3 is now available for download! This version is a major step forward in the history of SmartSwipe and we encourage all of our users to upgrade. To upgrade, you can either use the pop-up that appears in your version of Internet Explorer, or you can go to our downloads page to download the full version.

Happy holidays!

Between a bad case of writers' block and an extremely busy work schedule, I have not updated this blog in a very long time. However, I was digging around in Google Analytics, noticed an interesting trend and thought I would write about it on this blog.

It seems that a number of people reach our site when they are trying to figure out whether they have a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system. When I dig around online, I find a series of often confusing instructions. So, I wanted to draw attention to a simple web-based tool that one of my co-workers came up with. If you are trying to figure out whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit browser, please open up Internet Explorer and click on this link. Please note - depending on what version of Internet Explorer you use, you may have to hold down the CTRL key while you click that link!

When you click on that link, a popup window will appear that will tell you whether you use a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system. Based on our testing, this popup is incredibly accurate, but if you have another experience, please let us know.

While I have been following online scams for quite awhile, every once in a while, I read about one that makes my blood boil. Yesterday, I heard about a phishing scam that made me pretty angry and today, I got enough confirmation to write an article about it.

There is a phishing email going around right now that says that people who were vaccinated against H1N1 have to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) web site to create a "Personal H1N1 Vaccination Profile". And, when people click on the link to create their profile, they are directed to a site which will steal their personal health information and (in some cases) try to infect their computers with malicious software.

Coremetrics, the web site sales tracking firm, announced some exciting numbers from Cyber Monday 2009. According to their numbers, consumers bought 30% more items on Cyber Monday 2009 than on Cyber Monday 2008! Moreover, total sales were up 13.7% when compared to 2008.

These are some incredibly encouraging numbers from the world of online retailing. However, not all of Coremetrics numbers were quite so good. One particularly important metric (shopping cart conversions) was 3.11% lower than in 2008. And both sports retailers and department stores saw their average order volume drop when compared to Cyber Monday 2008.

Internet security news can often be rather bleak and depressing, but every once in awhile, you come across a truly funny news article. CNet came out with an article a couple of days ago that made me laugh/shake my head and I would like to share it with all of you.

A Masters of Fine Arts student named Zach Gage came up with an interesting idea for his thesis. So, he programmed a game that runs on MacIntosh computers. Resembling Space Invaders (Space Invaders gave an entire generation carpal tunnel syndrome), Gage's project has a twist - every time you destroy an alien ship, Zach's game deletes a random file on your computer. Gage is incredibly upfront about this - his web site warns you that you will permanently lose data and the game also warns you of this when you start it!

Those of you who follow this spot know that I am a big fan of Phonebusters and that I like to re-print and promote their statistics on identity theft in Canada. Further, you may have noticed a rather troubling trend - identity theft seems to be on the rise.

With that trend in mind, I was especially happy to see Phonebusters' October numbers. In October 2009, only 295 people called Phonebusters and reported being a victim of identity theft! These people were defrauded out of a total of $609,933.79. Those numbers compare favourably to September 2009, when 808 people were defrauded out of a total of $1,143,206.95.