Stealing Your Life or Enterprise Integration Patterns

Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan

Author: Frank W Abagnal

The charismatic forger immortalized in the film Catch Me If You Can exposes the astonishing tactics of today’s identity theft criminals and offers powerful strategies to thwart them based on his second career as an acclaimed fraud-fighting consultant.
Consider these sobering facts:

        *Six out of ten American companies and government agencies have already been hacked.

        *An estimated 80 percent of birth certificate requests are fulfilled through the mail for people using only a name and a return address. So I could take your name and use my address, and get your birth certificate. From there I’m off to the races.

        *Americans write 39 billion checks a year, and half of these folks never reconcile their bank statements.

        *A Social Security number costs $49 on the black market. A driver’s license goes for $90. A birth certificate will set you back $79.


When Frank Abagnale trains law enforcement officers around the country about identity theft, he asks officers for their names and addresses and nothing more. In a matter of hours he can obtain everything he would need to steal their lives: Social Security numbers, dates of birth, current salaries, checking account numbers, the names of everyone in their families, and more. This illustrates how easy it is for anyone from anywhere in the world to assume our identities and in a matter of hours devastate our lives in ways that can take years to recover from. Considering that a fresh victim is hit every fourseconds, Stealing Your Life is the reference everyone needs by an unsurpassed authority on the latest identity theft schemes.

Abagnale offers dozens of concrete steps to transform anyone from an easy mark into a hard case that criminals are likely to bypass:

• Don’t allow your kids to use the computer on which you do online banking and store financial records (children are apt to download games and attachments that host damaging viruses or attract spyware).

• Beware of offers that appeal to greed or fear in exchange for personal data.

• Monitor your credit report regularly and know if anyone’s been “knocking on your door.”

• Read privacy statements carefully and choose to opt out of sharing information whenever possible.


Brimming with anecdotes of creative criminality that are as entertaining as they are enlightening, Stealing Your Life is the practical way to shield yourself from one of today’s most nefarious and common crimes.

Publishers Weekly

Offering spine-tingling terror for anyone who has a Social Security number and birth date, counterfeiting expert Abagnale (author of Catch Me if You CanвЂ"a memoir detailing his former life in crime) chronicles the means and aftereffects of identity theft. Studded with alarming case histories, the first half of the book reads like a how-to for would-be thieves, offering a closeup look at financial and criminal fraud and Americans' particular vulnerability to it. By page 100, many readers will be willing to do anything to prevent a future fraud against them. Fortunately, Abagnale supplies a 20-step prevention plan in the second half, including basic tips such as regularly checking your credit report, using a shredder and avoiding questionable Internet sites and ATMs. For those unlucky enough to be victimized, he offers step-by-step instructions on filing a police report and contacting the Fair Trade Commission. Above all, this heart-pounding guide drives home the point that identity theft can come from any direction at any time to anyoneвЂ"whether a careless credit card user, diehard check-writer, "cash-only" buyer or even the deceased. (Apr. 24)

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

The Sweetest Con of All     9
The Next Victim - and It's You     38
The Road to Becoming You     52
It Could Be Public Enemy Number One or It Could Be Grandma     108
What Your Duplicate Is Doing as You     132
The Twenty Steps to Prevent Identity Theft     159
Understanding Trade Lines and the Meaning of R2     202
Remember That Privacy Statement You Threw Away?     236
My Farewell to Checks     256
They Got Me - Now What?     270
The Crime That Keeps on Stealing     291
Write Your Company and Congressperson - Now!     309
Staying Two Steps Ahead (or Three)     344
Acknowledgments     353

New interesting book: Food Production or Winepassport

Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions

Author: Gregor Hohp

Would you like to use a consistent visual notation for drawing integration solutions? Look inside the front cover.

Do you want to harness the power of asynchronous systems without getting caught in the pitfalls? See "Thinking Asynchronously" in the Introduction.

Do you want to know which style of application integration is best for your purposes? See Chapter 2, Integration Styles.

Do you want to learn techniques for processing messages concurrently? See Chapter 10, Competing Consumers and Message Dispatcher.

Do you want to learn how you can track asynchronous messages as they flow across distributed systems? See Chapter 11, Message History and Message Store.

Do you want to understand how a system designed using integration patterns can be implemented using Java Web services, .NET message queuing, and a TIBCO-based publish-subscribe architecture? See Chapter 9, Interlude: Composed Messaging.

Utilizing years of practical experience, seasoned experts Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf show how asynchronous messaging has proven to be the best strategy for enterprise integration success. However, building and deploying messaging solutions presents a number of problems for developers. Enterprise Integration Patterns provides an invaluable catalog of sixty-five patterns, with real-world solutions that demonstrate the formidable of messaging and help you to design effective messaging solutions for your enterprise.

The authors also include examples covering a variety of different integration technologies, such as JMS, MSMQ, TIBCO ActiveEnterprise, MicrosoftBizTalk, SOAP, and XSL. A case study describing a bond trading system illustrates the patterns in practice, and the book offers a look at emerging standards, as well as insights into what the future of enterprise integration might hold.

This book provides a consistent vocabulary and visual notation framework to describe large-scale integration solutions across many technologies. It also explores in detail the advantages and limitations of asynchronous messaging architectures. The authors present practical advice on designing code that connects an application to a messaging system, and provide extensive information to help you determine when to send a message, how to route it to the proper destination, and how to monitor the health of a messaging system. If you want to know how to manage, monitor, and maintain a messaging system once it is in use, get this book.
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