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.

Daryl Silzer, our Vice President of Business Development is celebrating a birthday today. So, we decided to carry out a little SmartSwipe custom and do something horrible to him.

Happy Birthday, Daryl - from the entire SmartSwipe team!

In my last article, I touched on Washington State's Computer Spyware Act. That piece of legislation immediately caught my interest, so I decided to research it further and share the results of my research with all of our readers. Needless to say, I am definitely a fan of this kind of legislation. As I wrote in my last article, "Detailed, on-point legislation like this is a necessary first step for combating cyber-crime. It is a huge step up from the maze of fraud charges and consumer protection statutes that some jurisdictions must navigate to shut down cyber-criminals."

Now that I have had a chance to read the entire act, I think I am even a bigger fan of this piece of legislation. Simply put, it is tough legislation that is built around 21st century crime. And, the more I read it, the more I realize that it is flexible enough to adapt to the next phase of cybercrime.

On October 19, 2009, Symantec released its Report on Rogue Security Software. This report is very short (under 50 pages), yet it is full of extremely useful information on the rise of scareware. As well, Symantec's web site (linked to above) has a huge amount of supplementary information on scareware.

We have been talking about scareware since Daniel McCann's second post on the SmartSwipe blog. So, the facts that scareware is booming and that it is one of the most unethical scams in an internet that is full of scams should not be new.

And today is the day...

After years of speculation, Microsoft officially released Windows 7 today. While Microsoft's site is comparatively low key, bloggers have been lighting up the web with their initial impressions and mini-reviews. One particularly funny Windows 7 article comes courtesy of Scott Stein, who wrote about the Windows 7 Whopper on Crave. Get this - in Japan, for a limited time, you can go into a Burger King and order a Windows 7 Whopper. The Windows 7 Whopper has seven patties and is over five inches tall. If I lived in Japan, I could get a new operating system, buy lunch, and qualify for a triple bypass all in the same day.

I have always been a huge Star Wars fan. When I was in kindergarten, I decided that I was going to be a Jedi when I 'grew up'. Quickly realizing that the force was not strong in me, I got quite interested in astronomy and, at one point, badly wanted to become an astronaut.

As I grew, my dreams changed - I got bitten by the writing bug and devoted much of my teens and twenties to learning how to craft words. But, while I never actually pursued my dreams of becoming an astronaut, I still consider myself something of a space nerd. So, I eagerly seek out and digest every bit of astronomy related news that I am lucky enough to hear about.

There seems to be a great divide amongst the general public about the relative safety of online shopping. There is one portion of the public that has become almost blaze about it, they trust the current system and simply couldn’t be bothered with the hype or perceived inconvenience of adding security. On the other side there is a large portion of the public who are so paranoid they refuse to make their first purchase over the internet. In its Fifth Annual UK Online Fraud Report CyberSource found that 41 per cent of people who do not currently shop online cite concerns about the security of online shopping as the reason.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about a bell curve of people with some on each extreme, but this debate seems to be greatly exaggerated at the two extremes with a disproportionate few at the (usually) reasonable middle portion. By middle portion I mean those that enjoy shopping online while taking precautions. I think the main reason most online shoppers implicitly trust the system, and, therefore, put themselves at risk, is because of a lack of education. Ironically it is also lack of education that keeps non-online shoppers from taking the plunge. So is education the answer to the continuing growth of the online channel? Well, not exactly.