Prevent Identity Theft -- Protect Yourself from Zero Day Attacks
Add these methods of protection to your arsenal and prevent identity theft
Are you reading and learning everything possible in effort to prevent identity theft from happening to you? Then you may have come across the term zero day attack. You don't hear much about these attacks, but be aware of this type of identity theft.
Prevent identity theft -- Avoid zero day attacks
You may be wondering what is a zero day attack. This attack occurs at the release of new software. No software is perfect and thieves and hackers wait to pounce on new software and find their weaknesses. Once they locate a weakness or a hole in security, they attack by several different means. Their attack may just corrupt your system and cause major headaches for you. Or it may attack and get your personal information for identity theft purposes.
The best way of preventing identity theft and a zero day attack from happening to you is to not rush out and buy the latest software. If instead, you are patient and wait a reasonable amount of time, you avoid many of these attacks.
When a company releases new software, especially one like Microsoft, it seems to be an open invitation for hackers to attack. Why? I don't know. I suspect it has a lot to do with ego. Hackers feel like they have "beaten the system" or proven their hacking skills and possibly gained status in the eyes of their hacker friends if they can wreak havoc with a major software producer.
At the release of new software, you can bet hackers around the world work overtime trying to cause problems and show the company "who's boss." To prevent identity theft, wait before you buy. If you wait until the dust settles after the release, hackers will have attacked and the software engineers develop patches that protect you with security fixes.
If you find you just can't wait to get the latest and greatest software released, try whitelisting. Whitelisting technologies only allows good applications to access your system so unknowns can't get through and corrupt your system.
There are many different ways to prevent identity theft -- being aware of zero day attacks is one of them. Remember to stay alert and follow good practices to be sure you prevent identity theft from happening to you.