When it comes to your blog, do you get personal? That is, do you openly publish personal details about your off-line life; what you do, why you do it, when you do it, where you do it and who you do it with?
This blog, in particular, was never intended to be a platform for the disclosure of personal information, but as someone who writes their own blog posts (I know some people don’t) it’s not always easy to write from a personal perspective without getting personal.
With the threat of identity theft hanging over each of us, just how safe is it to disclose personal details that others might use to impersonate you and just how much personal information are you disclosing without even realising it?
For the paranoid webmaster (shouldn’t we all be?), there’s the potential for an identity thief to collate a whole host of your personal information and use it fraudulently. There can’t be many situations where you’d be happy to leave your home address and signature lying around, but many website owners do just that and much worse.
Let’s have a look at some of the potential unwanted disclosure points:
- Public WHOIS information associated with your domain name. It’s very easy to access name, address, telephone and email information about a domain registrant simply by using one of the multitude of WHOIS tools freely available online.
- Many websites proudly display photographs of their owners. Being able to put a face to personal information is always useful for social engineering.
- Signatures can be handy when it comes to fraud. How many sales letters have you seen brandishing a signature?
- With your home address already harvested from your WHOIS information, it would be really handy for a burglar to know when you’re out of town. If you blog about forthcoming holidays then that’s exactly what you’re telling them.
If you think you’re only giving your opinion on your website, think again. You could actually be giving away a lot more than you bargained for…
Technorati Tags: Identity theft, Fraud, Social Engineering
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