MHackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says

This is old news, but it still scares me. What is an identiy worth these days?

 

Hackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says

By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

Identity thieves are offering a person’s credit-card number, date of birth and other sensitive information for as little as US$14 over the Internet, said a new report on online threats released Monday.

The data is sold on so-called “underground economy servers,” used by criminal organizations to hawk information they’ve captured through hacking, Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report, which tracked online trends from June to December 2006. The information can then be used for identity scams such as opening a bank account in a false name.

“U.S.-based credit cards with a card verification number were available for between US$1 to $6, while an identity — including a U.S. bank account, credit card, date of birth and government-issued identification number — was available for between $14 to $18,” the report said.

Source: Macworld: News: Hackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says

34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog

My biggest offense is infrequent posting. For this I have a remedy. Post more frequently. 

34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog

Thanks to everyone who has added their thoughts on why they unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed. There have been 109 comments left on that post so far and some interesting recurring themes have emerged.

I’ve attempted to categorize them below. Obviously with 103 opinions (and most people giving multiple reasons all in their own words) I’ve had to make some judgement calls in classifying comments left. Some of the categories below have overlap but I think you’ll get a pretty good picture of what motivates people to unsubscribe from RSS feeds.

34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from RSS feeds:

• Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming) – 37
• Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead) – 29
• Partial Excerpts Feeds – 25
• Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting) – 23
• Too many posts that I see elsewhere (Redundant, Repeated or Recycled News) – 19
• Uninteresting Content – 16
• Irrelevant Content – 13
• The Blogger’s Ego – Too much self promotion – 11
• Low Quality Content – 11
• Too many posts that are too long – 10
• Negative blogging – 7
• Feed Errors – Especially when a Feed Reloads the latest 10-20 posts every time – 7
• Offensive Content/Personal attacks/Discrimination – 6
• ‘infomercials’ (too much selling) – 6
• Blog Titles that Don’t Tell what the post is about – 5
• No or Poor Formatting in posts – 5
• My own interests as a reader change – 5
• No Longer Useful or Valuable – 4
• Too many links in the text and not enough content – 4
• Advertising – 3
• Inconsistent writing (style and focus) – 2
• Too Many Grammatical Errors – 2
• Found other feeds that are better – 2
• Too Narrow a focus – 1
• Too much repetition in topic – 1
• Pushiness of Blogger – 1
• Blogger Doesn’t Respond to Comments – 1
• No Images in the feed – 1
• Lack of Confidence or Opinion – 1
• Lack of a sense of who the blogger is – 1
• Too much clutter/extras at the end of posts – 1
• Talking Down to Readers – 1
• Too many quotes – 1
• Change of Primary blogger – 1

Source: 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog