Fraudsters traded 12 million pieces of personal information online between January and April this year, according to research. The figure represents a threefold increase on 2010.
Credit-checking company Experian, which produced the figures, said the increase was partly due to consumers having a growing number of online accounts. Consumers now have an average of 26 separate online logins but just five different passwords.
Experian said many people were unaware their identity had been stolen until they were refused credit cards or mobile phone contracts. It advised people to change their passwords regularly and make them more complicated so they are harder for fraudsters to crack.
Two thirds of people have accounts they no longer use but have not closed down, leaving them vulnerable, the research found. This was borne out last week when hackers broke into Yahoo's servers and stole 450,000 passwords, many from defunct accounts. Those who had been victims of the growing issue of identity fraud suffered:
Refusal of loans or credit cards (14%)
Debts being run up in their name (9%)
Refusal of mobile phone contracts (7%)
Being chased by debt collectors for money they did not owe (7%)
Every week brings fresh headlines about stolen IDs. Last week, alongside the Yahoo hack, it was revealed that one million user IDs had been stolen from the Android forum and graphics hardware maker Nvidia said 400,000 passwords had been stolen from its forums.
This led Microsoft to reveal that 20% of Microsoft account logins are found on lists of compromised credentials as a result of hacks into other websites. Writing on the Microsoft blog, Eric Doer said "These attacks shine a spotlight on the core issue - people reuse passwords between different websites."
HOW TO MAKE A GOOD PASSWORD!
Use a password checker to see whether your password is strong or weak
Strong passwords contain a mixture of letters and numbers, the more random the better
Users worried about remembering obscure passwords can use random password generators
Online random password generators should not be used for secure services such as bank accounts
Using first letters of a speech from Shakespeare or a favourite poem offers one way to keep it obscure but memorable
It is OK to write passwords down as long as the paper copy is kept safe
Avoid dictionary words, words spelt backwards, sequences or repeated characters
Never use personal information such as date of birth,National ID, Driving License No etc
Athletes and officials are arriving at the Olympic Village, with 11 days to go until the London Games open. Heathrow Airport is expecting its busiest day on record and on the main route out - the M4 - the first priority "Games Lane" is in operation. Work is also starting at the lab which will conduct some 6,000 drugs tests.
Meanwhile, police had to deploy extra officers from nine UK forces at short notice to help with security work for London 2012. This follows the news last week that 3,500 troops had been drafted in to plug gaps after private security firm G4S failed to recruit enough guards for the Games.
In the Commons, Home Secretary Theresa May answered an urgent question on Olympics security from shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper saying that it was "untrue" that ministers knew last year that there would be a shortfall in the numbers of security personnel they had been promised. "G4S repeatedly assured us that they would overshoot their targets," she said. Mrs May said the government had taken immediate action after becoming aware of the shortage last Wednesday.
Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison said: "Whilst some of the activity police officers are undertaking was not anticipated, plans were put in place to allow us to do this. "Forces are making sure they make the best use of their resources locally to do all they can to minimise the impact on local policing."
Heathrow Airport is expecting to process as many as 236,955 passengers in a day, which would surpass its previous record of 233,562 set on 31 July last year. This compares with 190,000 passengers through Heathrow on an average day.
Some 335 competitors are expected on Monday, as part of 1,027 so-called "Games Family" arrivals (including athletes and coaches) from more than 50 countries. Heathrow operator BAA expects the busiest day for arriving athletes to be 24 July. Volunteers have been directing athletes to the coaches and trains taking many of them to the Olympic Village in Stratford, east London.
The village will house 16,000 athletes and officials at its peak. Those leaving the airport by road should benefit from the first of the Games Lanes, which at busy times will operate between Junction 3 and Junction 2 of the M4 motorway towards London.
The rest of the 30 miles of dedicated lanes in the Olympic Route Network (ORN) will be operational by the middle of next week, with heavy fines for those who misuse them. All road users will be able to go into the lanes when they are not in use overnight.
Sports Minister Hugh Robertson said the authorities had plans to lift the restrictions if they were causing gridlock. Kevin Delaney, from the Institute of Advanced Motorists, said the lanes could exacerbate traffic problems in the capital. "If anything goes wrong with the central and inner London transport network, we tend to get a wholly disproportionate amount of congestion - and so the Games lanes themselves will actually impose serious constraints on this already stretched network," he said.
The biggest anti-doping operation in the history of the Olympics is also beginning at the London 2012 laboratory. Half of the competitors will be tested including every medallist at the Olympics and Paralympics. G4S chief executive Nick Buckles is due to appear before the Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday to answer MPs' questions about the firm's failures over the Games.
The company has said it stands to lose up to £50m on the contract, worth a total of about £280m, after being unable to provide the 10,000 staff it had been contracted to deliver. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond is also expected to deal with some of the implications for troops when he responds to MPs' questions in the Commons later. Mrs May said she was only made aware of the scale of the problem at G4S on Wednesday.
Prime Minister David Cameron said the government had been monitoring potential Olympics problems since taking power in 2010. "Obviously the G4S issue, the full extent of that didn't come to light until relatively recently as they were going through the final stages of hiring the temporary staff," he said. "Let me pay tribute to the soldiers who are going to do a great job of making sure we deliver a secure Olympics."
The Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: "It's absolutely vital that we get the message across these Games are going to be very safe, very secure. Obviously you can never be complacent about security, you can never take anything for granted - and huge amounts of work continue to be done, particularly on the intelligence side, to make sure that we have anticipated every conceivable threat - but London will be very, very safe."
And he added: "I think we are still the last moment before curtain up, and there is a bit of pre-curtain up jitters and casting around for things to talk about. When the athletics gets going, when the whole thing kicks off, when the opening ceremony begins, then I think a lot of these issues that we are currently now discussing will melt away."
IMPORTANT TIPS
If you are nothing to do with the Olympics and are flying into Heathrow in the next few days, don't wear a track suit.
Anyone resembling an athlete is jumped on by the waiting media. "What do you think of London? How excited are you about the Games?" "Er… I'm just back from my gap year."
Having said that, we've already had hundreds of athletes through Terminal 4.
The American sailing team were first to fly in. Italian, Ivory Coast and Cambodian teams are expected in the next few hours.
Some carry javelins and sails in outsize baggage - maybe leaving a bit of space in their suitcases for a medal.
They are welcomed by a huge crew of smiling, garishly-dressed Olympic volunteers - and by armed police with sniffer dogs.
So far, the airport process has apparently been quick and pain-free for athletes. But it is early days. And they haven't crossed London yet....
Heathrow has made provision for oversized baggage
Some 335 competitors are expected at Heathrow on Monday, as part of 1,027 'Games Family' arrivals
A US man has recovered a vintage sports car he spotted being sold on eBay 42 years after thieves stole it from him, officials in California say. Robert Russell, 66, said he had never given up searching for the 1967 Austin-Healey, which was stolen in 1970.
After seeing the car on eBay, he found that the vehicle identification number on the website matched the one on his title certificate. The car was being put up for auction by a dealer in Los Angeles.
The dealer told Mr Russell they had bought it from a man who said it had been in his family since 1970. After checking Mr Russell's claim, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department told him he could pick up his vehicle.
He has since brought it back to Texas where he currently lives. Mr Russell told police he had originally bought the vehicle for $3,000 (£1,925). It is now valued at $23,000.
Scientists have found a novel way to get images through "scattering" materials such as frosted glass or skin, and even to "see around corners". Much research in recent years has focused on correcting for scattering, mostly for medical applications.
But the new trick is quick, simple and uses natural light rather than lasers. It uses what is called a spatial light modulator to "undo" the scattering that makes objects opaque or non-reflecting.
A camera that can "see around corners" garnered much attention in 2010, using a series of timed laser pulses to illuminate a scene and working out what is around a corner from the timing of the reflections. The prototype device was just one of a great many research efforts trying to crack the problem of scattering. But for some applications, the "time-of-flight" approach that the laser-based camera uses is not sufficient.
"If you want to look to see an embryo developing inside an egg but the eggshell scatters everything, or you want to look through the skin, scattering is the main enemy there, and time-of-flight is not a good solution," explained senior author of the study Yaron Silberberg Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For those kinds of problems, Prof Silberberg and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have pushed the limits of what spatial light modulators (SLMs) can do.
SLMs modify what is known as the phase of an incoming light beam. Like a series of waves on the ocean that run over rocks or surfers, the waves in light can be slowed down or redirected when they hit scattering materials.
SLMs are made up of an array of pixels that can correct for this by selectively slowing down some parts of the beam and allowing others to pass untouched - when an electric field is applied to a pixel, it changes the speed at which light passes through it.
Prof Silberberg and his team first set up their SLM by shining light from a normal lamp through a highly scattering plastic film and allowing a computer to finely tune the SLM until they could see a clear image of the lamp through the film. Keeping the SLM set this way, they were then able to obtain clear images of other objects through the film - the SLM effectively turns the film back into a clear sheet.
"What we have shown is that you don't need lasers - everybody else was doing this with lasers, and we showed you can do it with incoherent light from a lamp or the Sun - natural light," Prof Silberberg said. But the team then realised that the same approach can work in reflection - that is, not passing through a scattering material but bouncing off of it, such as the case of light bouncing off a wall at a corner.
They then showed the procedure works just as well when the light from an object bounces off a piece of paper; the SLM could "learn" how to undo the paper's scattering effect, making it a nearly perfect reflector. As Prof Silberberg puts it: "You can take a piece of wall and effectively turn it into a mirror, and this is the part that makes everybody raise an eyebrow."
However, he said that the primary use for the technique will be in biological and medical studies - especially tackling the highly scattering white brain matter in neurological imaging - rather than the business of seeing through thin materials or around corners.
"I don't want to say that it solves the problems of secret organisations and Peeping Toms and so on, that's not going to be so simple. But the principle is there. We have not started to tackle these things... but I see how much interest this raises and think maybe we should."
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