Child Identity Theft: Old Crimes, New Victims

Table of Contents

• A Vulnerable Age and Season for Identity Theft
• How Does Child Identity Theft Happen?
• The Targets and the Perpetrators 
• What You Can Do
  • Establish a Baseline
  • Keep Protections Current
  • Remain Vigilant
  • Implement Strong, Regularly Updated Passwords
  • Minimize Requirements for Personal and Private Information
  • Encrypt Everything Possible
  • Educate Everyone
  • Obtain the Best Available Tools
• Take Virima to School

The school year has now started in much of the world. Christmas and other end-of-year holidays are approaching. This time of year shadows a particularly insidious cyber security threat: the theft of children’s identities.

As MarketWatch reported during August 2018, a study found more than 1 million children were victims of identity fraud during 2017. The resulting costs? Approximately $2.6 billion.

“With limited financial history or existing account activity, children are the most likely to become victims of new-account fraud, the research showed. These attacks can occur before children even become active Internet users, with some two-thirds of victims being under the age of eight.”

A Vulnerable Age and Season for Identity Theft

Sadly, research indicates a family or friend commits approximately one-third of child identity theft. Hackers, however, are increasingly targeting children for identity theft as well. 

As the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported during August 2018, “Children are 35 times more likely to be victims of identity theft because they don’t have a credit history and their Social Security number isn’t active, according to the Division of Consumer Protection of the New York Department of State.”

Such identities are perfect for opening new, fraudulent accounts, and just in time for the holiday shopping season. Undiscovered until the victim becomes an adult and attempts activities like opening a bank account or applying for a job, child identity theft can occur.

How Does Child Identity Theft Happen?

Often, at or from the schools they attend.

The team or activity requests personal information from each child who wants to sign up. This sometimes even includes the child’s Social Security number. The identities and personal information of staff and faculty are at risk as well.

During September 2018, Digital Trends reported how security experts demonstrated, “how the fax function on a 1990s-era HP printer could be used to infiltrate network security.” Few or no dedicated cyber security staff or resources support many school networks, which are populated with mixes of older and newer technologies.

Beyond hacking, students, faculty, and staff are at least as susceptible to phishing and social engineering as users in the corporate world. 

The Targets and the Perpetrators

According to the 2018 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, “4% of the targets in any given phishing campaign will click it. And incredibly, the more phishing emails someone has clicked, the more likely they are to do so again.”

As Help Net Security reported during September 2018, “Earlier this year, the U.S. government charged nine Iranian hackers with stealing 31 terabytes of information worth more than $3 billion from over 300 American and foreign universities. The hackers used spear-phishing attacks, which are personally targeted bogus emails. to hack 8,000 accounts, including 3,768 at U.S. schools.” 

Most primary, middle, and high schools are even more vulnerable than colleges and universities.

What You Can Do

If you are an IT or cyber security team member at a school, then there are several steps you and your colleagues can take to increase protection of your students, colleagues, and friends. 

If you have kids in a school or live or work near a school, then you can share these recommendations with the technology decision makers there, too.

Establish a Baseline

Make sure all deployed, authorized endpoints, servers, and networks adhere to strict, consistent security guidelines. If there are no established guidelines, seek assistance to create them. Sources should include trusted vendors and recognized, respected sources, such as the Cybersecurity Framework from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Keep Protections Current

Implement technologies and processes to verify continuously that endpoints and servers are running current security patches and all required security apps.

Remain Vigilant

Regularly scan your environment to detect rogue devices and connections, ensuring nothing has been deployed or reset with a default or no password. This is a particular concern where so-called Internet of Things devices, such as smart lighting, speakers, and video cameras are concerned. 

Many of these have no or woefully inadequate security features, making them easily breached entry points into your environment.

Implement Strong, Regularly Updated Passwords

Demand them, enforce those demands and run tests to gauge the security of your accounts and that of your children.

Minimize Requirements for Personal and Private Information

The less that’s collected, the less there is to steal. At the very least, reduce or eliminate the use of Social Security numbers as unique identifiers.

Encrypt Everything Possible

The additional protection provided to users and the entire IT environment will justify any minor inconveniences to users.

Encourage parents and guardians to put a security freeze on the credit report of every minor in their care. Regulations and methods vary from state to state and among the credit reporting agencies.

Educate Everyone

The only effective defense against phishing and social engineering attacks are emphatic, repeated training. Occasional surprise fake phishing emails can help as well.

Obtain the Best Available Tools

Your IT management solutions should incorporate robust, easy-to-use features that help you discover, monitor, and protect your critical IT assets – hardware, software, and information.

Take Virima to School

IT Discovery, IT Asset Management (ITAM), and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools from Virima can help almost any school, college or university deliver the connectivity and computing power students, faculty and staff need and want, securely and economically. 

They can capture and inventory data about your IT environment’s components automatically. Allowing you to map dependencies, visualize relationships, and provide accurate, complete, and timely information about your IT estate.

These benefits can help make your environment more responsive, stable, and secure. Virima’s Managed SaaS Services can help you deploy your Virima solutions faster, and fine-tune them for optimal performance and value as needs evolve at your school. Learn more about Virima’s solutions here.

Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!