39P. Nature and Extent of Identity Crime through Wireless Technology Abuse and its Impact on Individual and Organisational Levels

Perpetrator(s) are stealing personal data abusing wireless networks to commit identity fraud and related crimes that is affecting us on individual, organisational and national levels. These threats affect national security also (Smith et al. 2010). There have been instances of identity and data theft crimes involving millions of debit and credit card numbers, which indicate the seriousness of this issue and reinforce the concerns of security professionals. These cases were taken from newspapers and recent research papers related to this field and analysed in this study. The objective of this research paper is to investigate the security weaknesses in the wireless protocols and examine how perpetrators are exploiting the wireless networks. The security limitations found in the commonly used types of wireless networks are also presented. The sharing of information on social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter also pose privacy and security threats. The current study presents guidelines and discusses approaches employed to safeguard and protect wireless networks in organisations. It is a study to create public awareness about the threats and related privacy issues in the use of wireless and hand held communication devices