Recovering From Identity Theft

By Ronald J. Leach

The headline was dreadful from a consumer's perspective. Data from all Target stores had been criminally hacked, and essential information on forty million credit and debit cards was stolen in November and December of 2013. There are reports of angry consumers calling Target's customer service and demanding help. The merchant is the wrong place to call, just as it was pointless to call T. J. Maxx when the data contained on sixty million of their customer's cards were illegally obtained by criminal hackers.
This easy-to-understand book is the fourth in the Identity Theft series. It is intended for the general, non-specialist reader, provides a set of overall strategies and specific actions you should take if you are the victim of identity theft.
There are three appendices. The first appendix contains contact information for the Federal Trade Commission, the three major credit reporting agencies, many US banks, many consumer protection organizations, and a few of the more established companies that specialize in identity theft protection and recovery. The second appendix contains a checklist for protecting yourself from identity theft. Appendix three also contains a checklist; this one is used to aid you in recovering from identity theft if you are a victim.
Ron Leach's lectures on identity theft have been attended by more than 3,500 people. Many more have heard him on closed-circuit television. This experience, and his long experience as a professor of computer science make him uniquely qualified to write this book, the fourth in AfterMath’s Identity Theft Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald J. Leach
• Release date: Nov 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310060656

Ronald J. Leach

About the Author I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair.  (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.)  While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States.  We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university.  I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department’s hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users.  We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems. As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads.  I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications.  My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists.  More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television. I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas. My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years.   I was the editor or co-editor of that society’s journal for many years.

Book preview

Recovering From Identity Theft

Ronald J. Leach

About the Author

Preface

Some Data on Identity Theft

Introduction to Recovering From Identity Theft

A Generic Plan For Victims Of Identity Theft

Recovering From Identity Theft As Part Of An Actual Physical Theft

Recovering From Identity Theft As Part Of A Cyber Attack

Recovering From Identity Theft: Were You A Victim Of An Identity Breach?

Recovering From Identity Theft Caused By An Impersonation

Medical Identity Theft – a special kind of impersonation

Some Companies Specialize In Identity Theft Repair

Conclusion

Appendix 1:  Sources for Further Information

Appendix 2:  Checklist for Protecting Yourself From Identity Theft

Appendix 3:  Recovering From Identity Theft

Acknowledgements

Copyright © 2013 by Ronald J. Leach

Cover design by AfterMath

Book design by Ronald J. Leach

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

About the Author

I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 as a department chair. (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.) While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States. We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university. I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department’s hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users. We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems.

As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads. I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications. My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists.

Books by Ronald J. Leach

Using C in Software Design

Using C in Software Design, Second Edition

Advanced Topics in UNIX

Advanced Topics in UNIX, Second Edition

The 101 Most Important UNIX and Linux Commands

Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs

Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs, Second Edition

Fastest Paths to a Job in the Computer Industry

Object-Oriented Design and Programming in C++

Introduction to Software Engineering

Data Recovery

Identity Theft in the Cyber Age

Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft

The Bible as a Manual for Identity Theft

Recovering from Identity Theft

Relative Genealogy

Genealogy for the Information Age

Why 2K?

Eat Kids At School

Secrets of Pricing Your eBook

Preface

In this book we discuss recovering from one of the most common crimes in the United States – identity theft. It is possibly the most common crime, because identity theft is often a part of other crimes. The title of the book reflects the current reality of identity theft in this Internet-driven world