Personally Identifable Information

Another way to effectively protect personal identifiable data is to protect your browser. Jeremiah Grossman is the founder of Whitehat Security, which is a well known cyber security company in the United States. In one of his articles titled “The Web Won't Be Safe or Secure until We Break It”, he writes that current browsers contain much vulnerability, which leaves the user unprotected from attack. He states that these attacks are usually written in HTML, Java script, and CSS coding. This kind of coding makes them very difficult to be picked up as malware by antivirus programs. So, these types of attacks take advantage of the loop holes the browser contains, and attack your computer to gather PII. In the article, Grossman argues that the best solution to fight these attacks is to make the browsers more like those of mobile devices. By using the same framework used by these mobile devices, we can effectively create much more secure browsers for our desktop computers, and address the loop holes that current browsers contain. Grossman calls these new kind of browsers “desk-top apps”. These desk-top apps can then be designed and incorporated, to the websites of various banking institutions, social media web sites, and other web pages with heavy traffic and bandwidth usage (Grossman 2012). Just like the apps that we use today for our mobile phones, the desktop apps that Grossman would like to introduce, would not contain a URL bar or other resembles to a web browser, and they will be separated from each other. So there will be various apps, for various major websites. (Jeremiah, 2013)

In conclusion, it has become increasingly common for various institutions and organizations to store information on employees, clients, customers and other associates online. However, this has led to increased chances of being victims of identity theft and other scams involving the use and implementation of our personal identifiable information. There is no one out