This Cyber Monday, Don't Let Cyberthieves Steal Your Identity

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are well known for their bargain deals, they also present cyber-thieves with many chances to fill their pockets with your credit card information or even worse your identity.

According to our recent research, identity theft, stolen credit card information, and cybercrime are the top concerns among UK consumers, with one in four believing they’ve already been a victim of ID theft.

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With this is mind, those shoppers looking to bag a deal should consider their security before making any online purchases. Here are a few tips to help you stay safe this Cyber Monday:

· Always shop with reputable sellers such as Amazon, and be cautious when entering URLs, a misspelled domain, or non-HTTPS sites. Any of these could land you on a false site designed to steal your information.

· Ensure you read the site’s privacy policy to understand how/where your personal information is being used.

· Be suspicious of links in unsolicited, phishing emails, and always type the link directly into your browser. Do not click on them within an email.

· If an online retailer requests a password for your email and bank account as part of the shopping process, do not enter it,. In general, always be sure to use different passwords for online retailers than those you use on email and bank accounts. Otherwise, if a hacker obtained the password for one site, they could then have access to many of your accounts.

· Secure mobile phones if you plan to use them for shopping by enabling security features such as passwords and encryption features. Whether online banking or Christmas shopping, the ability to manage our password security is crucial.

By Barry Scott, CTO, EMEA, Centrify

About Centrify

Centrify provides unified identity management across data center, cloud and mobile environments that deliver a single sign-on (SSO) for users and a simplified identity infrastructure for IT. Centrify’s unified identity management software and cloud-based Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solutions leverage an organization’s existing identity infrastructure to enable single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, privileged identity management, auditing for compliance and mobile device management. Centrify customers can typically reduce their total cost of identity management and compliance by more than 50 percent, while improving business agility and overall security. Centrify is used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, including nearly half of the Fortune 50 and more than 60 Federal agencies.