Identity theft through the use of the internet and how businesses and Literature review

Identity theft through the use of the internet and how businesses and people are affected by its continuous threats - Literature review Example In the end, the mission critical data is compromised, resulting in severe losses for organizations. Generally, the business functions and processes, which exist electronically and digitally within the organization needs to be protected. The people who use Internet, provides a lot of personal information on the Internet in order to perform banking, registration, subscription, purchasing a product or service. The personal information has enormous dimensions to get extracted and become vulnerabilities. One of the most common threats in the context of misusing personal information is identity theft A network dictionary demonstrate the concepts of Identity theft as â€Å"Identity theft is a crime in which an imposter obtains key pieces of personal information, such as Social Security or driver’s license numbers, in order to impersonate someone else. The information can be used to obtain credit, merchandise, and services in the name of the victim, or to provide the thief with false credentials.† In order to protect identities of the customer, organization need to protect and manage identities. A good definition of identity management is illustrated in the network dictionary as â€Å"Identity Management is an integrated system of business processes, policies and technologies that enable organizations to facilitate and control their users’ access to critical online applications and resources while protecting confidential personal and business information from unauthorized users†. In the code of deferral regulations (CFR), identity theft is defined as a fraud that is conducted by using the identity information of another person without permission. Identity theft can also contribute to other crimes. For instance, identify theft is successful in document fraud, bank fraud, immigration fraud and in the form of burglary and robbery. Consequently, the challenges for eliminating identity theft including victimization, offending and prosecution rate s, needs to be considered by the congress, as these threats are arising by the contribution of identity theft and related crimes (Finklea 2009). Online privacy policy is of great concern, when considering identity theft as privacy policies of some websites does not satisfy the users for disclosing their personal data. There is no undertaking from the website owner for securing the contents provided by the user online. This is one area, which needs research and improvement, in order to provide a mechanism of securing data privacy, policies that are implemented by web services to ease privacy concerns associated with information related to their clients and adhere to legislative measures. Moreover, this also involves the undertaking for personal data usage including, what organizations would do or not with the personal information of their clients. This is crucial as some websites may sell personal information of their clients to cyber criminals or other competitors in terms of cash. This personal information is substantial for online cyber criminals to extract and guess passwords and retrieve credit card numbers, once they break into the email account of users. In order to eliminate identity theft appropriate measures are required. Identity theft is categorized into two domains i.e. Physical identity theft and