You buy the best car seat. You diligently track vaccination schedules. You warn them about strangers who offer candy. But, because of people like Craig Curtis, your child needs more protection.

Curtis, 36, was convicted in December 2008 for organizing a scheme to steal children’s identities, and use their Social Security numbers to buy luxury cars and expensive townhouses in Houston. Most of the townhouses were in foreclosure within a year of being purchased.

He was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in federal prison for wire fraud and an additional two years for aggravated identity theft. He must also pay $2,085,396 in restitution to lenders, and will serve three more years of supervised release when he gets out of prison.

But, none of that is going to repair the damage done to children whose credit records now show they bought houses that ended up in foreclosure. Presumably, the young victims’ families know now about the ID theft, but correcting the credit files can take years, and in some cases, the errors may never be fully resolved.

Typically, children don’t have credit records. But, the first time a credit application is made using a child’s Social Security number, the file is created, and whatever birth date is used on the application becomes a permanent part of the file.

According to a recent study by Javelin Strategy and Research, 5% of children have at least one credit report using their Social Security number; among those 5%, the children have an average of $12,779 in fraudulent or wrongly assigned debt.

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Just like the phrase “open sesame” gave Ali Baba access to the thieves’ cave full of treasure, there are certain search terms that provide surfers with malware designed to commit identity theft.

New research by antivirus software company McAfee reveals search categories and search terms will take the user to malware infested web pages at least 20% of the time.

The arrived at their conclusions by analyzing the search results of 2,600 often-used terms on search engines Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask. After examining the 413,000 pages, they found some pages came with a much higher likelihood of cyber attacks.

Generally, searches within the categories of screensavers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and new were most likely to end badly.

Specifically, the most dangerous search terms on the Internet are:

• Word unscrambler
• Lyrics
• Myspace
• Free music downloads
• Phelps
• Game cheats
• Printable fill-in puzzles
• Free ringtones
• Solitaire

(I don’t know about you, but I’ve used at least four of those terms in the last 6 months.)

So, how do you protect your computer and, ultimately, your personal and financial information? To protect your computer, install a firewall, keep your anti-virus software up to date and stay aware of any newly released patches for your operating system. You might even consider trading in your PC for a Mac, as far fewer malware programs are written for them.

To protect your personal and financial information, consider enrolling in LifeLock’s identity theft protection services. Enroll using the LifeLock promo code DEFENSE to get the deepest discount available.

Captain Jason LaSart, of the Mille Lacs County Sheriff’s Department worked a lot of identity theft cases during his time on the Minnesota Crime Task Force, and he has a lot of stories to tell.

One of them is about a woman in her 60s who filled out a Medicare supplemental health insurance application with her medical information, name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and bank account numbers.

Three months later she began getting disturbing calls and letters from people who said they worked for bill collectors. She always paid her bills on time and had heard warnings about telephone scammers bent on identity theft, so she tore up the letters and hung up on the callers.

Six months after she put the application in her mailbox and raised the little red flag she learned she’d become an ID theft victim–someone in Florida used her information to open at least eight credit card accounts and maxed them out.

The insurance company never received her application. LaSart believes someone stole it from her mailbox and sold her information over the Internet.

So how can this kind of theft be avoided?

Never leave outgoing mail in an unlocked home mailbox. Replace yours with one that locks, or take outgoing mail to a United State Postal Service box.

Personal and financial information is commonly bought, sold and traded over the Internet. Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about their eRecon service that scours the Internet for customers’ information so thieves can be stopped before any damage is done.

Enroll using the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE and pay only $9 a month for the identity theft protection services chosen by nearly 1.5 million other Americans.

I still don’t know the origin of the name “Cannon to the Wiz,” but I’m happy to know the ringleader of the nationwide pickpocket and ID theft ring has been arrested along with nine of his cohorts.

Leonardo Darnell Zanders, 39, was arrested in April in Detroit and has been pegged as the lead defendant in a new federal conspiracy case.

The Cannon to the Wiz is thought to have as many as 200 members, many of whom travel to events attracting large crowds where they can steal wallets.

According to the Michigan State Police, the Final Four playoffs in Detroit last April was one of their venues. And, apparently Donna Pendergast, an assistant district attorney, was one of at least seven victims they hit that night.

“I was a nervous wreck,” Pendergast said. “All I could think of was a house being bought in my name. And you would never know about that until you end up with a bill collector on your doorstep.”

The feds started looking closely at Zanders in September 2007, when he was caught trying to Fed Ex three packages containing stolen personal checks, ID, bank cards and other documents. The loot was traced to 14 victims in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Zanders got away that time, but the feds got a lot closer to him when they searched his house and found documents for 36 victims in nine states and D.C. They then searched the house of alleged ring member Clyde Austin Gray (A.K.A. “Big Head” and “Poochie”) and found documents for another 85 victims.

May has been a record-setting month for college and university data breaches so far in 2009. With a total of 177,487 exposed records from only three schools, May accounts for a big chunk of the total 414, 825 records reported lost so far this year, though it accounts for less than 10% of the 35 known data breaches.

NOTE: When reading the totals, it’s important to know that the actual number of data breaches and exposed records is like much higher; many data breaches go unreported, and among those that are reported many involve an unknown number of records. So far this year, six of the 35 reported data breaches involve an unknown number of records.

And with that caveat, ladies and gentlemen, we now induct the following institutions of higher learning into the Data Breach Hall of Shame:

• Ball State University

LOCATION: Muncie, Indiana
BREACH TYPE: Hacker/User error
NUMBER AFFECTED: 2,000 individuals
COMPROMISED DATA: Web accounts

• University of California; University Health Services Center

LOCATION: Berkeley, California
BREACH TYPE: Hacker
NUMBER AFFECTED: 160,000+ current and former students from UC Berkeley and Mills College
COMPROMISED DATA: Names, Social Security numbers, health insurance information, immunization records and patient/physician information

• Kapiolani Community College
  LOCATION: Honolulu, Hawaii
  BREACH TYPE: Hacker
  NUMBER AFFECTED: 15,487 current and former students
  COMPROMISED DATA: Names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, Social Security numbers

LifeLock provides identity theft protection to nearly 1.5 million Americans. Whether you’re a college student, a college applicant, a college graduate or the parent of any of these, you should visit LifeLock.com to learn more about their services. Enroll using the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE to receive a discount.

Law enforcement officials have known for years that stolen identities are bought, sold and traded in highly secretive online chat rooms and forums. In fact, last year, the FBI revealed that Dark Market, a forum that catered to international identity theft entrepreneurs, was launched by them as part of a two-year sting operation.

Now, however, identity thieves are becoming shockingly brazen in e-marketing their stolen wares. A YouTube video that has recently been pulled is an example of this trend. In it, the poster is shown rifling through his wares: manila folders he claims contain his victims’ names, addresses, genders, Social Security numbers, mothers’ names, driver’s license numbers, birth dates, employment information, credit reports, net worth and details of real estate holdings and financial accounts.

Armed with that much information, there is virtually no limit to the damage that could be inflicted on the identity theft victims.

The seller offers this information for as little as $25 for a single data set, or $100 for five. The seller gave no indication in the video of how he obtained the information, or the extent of his inventory. However, in an email exchange with an investigate reporter, he offered to sell 100 of the identity sets, and directed the reporter to deposit payment into a PayPal account.

LifeLock provides their nearly 1.5 million members with eRecon™, a service that scours thousands of websites for the enrollees’ personal or financial information. If LifeLock members’ data are detected, they are immediately notified and LifeLock’s Certified Identity Theft Risk Management Specialists assist them in resolution or recovery as needed.

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April Fools day is over, and the Conficker is out of the headlines, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone.

Conficker is still reaching out to 500 more websites every day, and the infected computers are still talking to each other through peer-to-peer protocol (p2p, just like file-sharing application LimeWire), but so far they don’t seem to be chatting about much more than the weather.

The real damage will come when the Conficker worm receives its next command, but nobody knows for sure yet what that will be. Expectations are that Conficker is a mashup of sophisticated malware, bent on massive identity theft.

There is, however, a chance that Conficker’s mission is more sinister. France’s Navy’s computer network was infected in January, resulting in the grounding of aircraft at several bases. As well, the U.K. Ministry of Defense was hit especially hard, with administrative desktops and Royal Navy submarines infected. Another 800 computers in hospitals in Sheffield also reported infection.

The Conficker Working Group (CWG) estimates—broadly—that somewhere between 3 million and 15 million computers are infected, but only 6% of them are in North America. Vietnam, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia and Algeria have been hardest hit.

The CWG, a task force comprising 27 tech companies including Microsoft, McAffee, Facebook, Kasperky and Symantec, warns that 30% of computers running on the Microsoft operating system aren’t protected with the latest Conficker protection patches; those are the computers most at risk of infection.

Sometimes even identity thieves are the recipients of manna. This week it came in the form of New York City’s public housing residents’ confidential files found blowing through the streets of East New York.

The files contained enough information about the residents to make stealing their identities easy for even the greenest or laziest of thieves: names, addresses, Social Security numbers (even those of dependent children), birth dates, phone numbers, income affidavits, court orders, lease agreements and records of payment were among the files left there for the taking.

And take it they did. “I’ve seen people picking them up off the ground and putting them in their pockets,” said one witness.

New York Housing Authority officials don’t know how the files got there, but they stated that the agency shreds any documents containing residents’ confidential information before it’s disposed of.

“The incident is being investigated and appropriate disciplinary actions will be taken against the individuals responsible,” said agency spokeswoman Sheila Greene.

Greene also said that the residents will be alerted to the situation and provided with information about how to protect their personal information. (Really? Isn’t that like being told how to care for your new prosthetic limb by the doctor who mistakenly amputated your leg?)

In case you’re thinking the payoff for stealing the identities of people poor enough to live in public housing isn’t worth the trouble, consider Laura Bustamante, a Utah state employee who stole the identities of applicants for food stamps and Medicaid benefits and netted $70,000 within four months. She was sentenced this week to three years in federal prison.

We’re all potential identity theft victims, but lately college students seem to be especially vulnerable. We’re only seven weeks into 2009, and already eight universities have reported data breaches that placed roughly 40,000 students’ personal information at risk.

The most recent university data breach occurred at the University of Alabama, and affected 37,000 students. UA officials sent out letters this week explaining that 17 of their 400 databases were accessed by hackers in November.

The information on those compromised databases included names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and lab results of people who had blood or urine testing done at the UA Medical Center as far back as 1994.

The other university data breaches include

University of Rochester
450 students
Hackers

University of Oregon
Number of students affected unknown
Stolen laptop

Southern Oregon Community College
200 students
Stolen laptop

Missouri State University
565 students
Email sent with student information mistakenly attached

Kansas State University
45 students
Student information mistakenly posted on Internet

Ball State University
19 students
Email sent with student information mistakenly attached

Purdue University
962
Tax forms mistakenly mailed to wrong recipients

Having to move to a nursing home, or having to place a loved one in a nursing home, is surely one of the hardest things anyone can go through. No matter how well we research, how clean the place seems, or how nice the staff seems to be, it’s the horror stories we’ve all heard that keep us awake at night.

I hate to do it, but here’s another of those horror stories. Tamara Smith, a certified nursing assistant who worked in several Savannah, GA area nursing homes, has been charged with stealing the identities of more than 40 of the nursing home residents that she was supposed to be caring for.

She used that information to open credit card accounts, and to buy computers and cell phones.

Smith’s victims were as young as 60 and as old as 100. Along with the 43 identity theft charges against her, Smith will also receive an elder abuse charge for each victim over 65. More than half of her victims are, or were, residents at Tara Nursing Home in Thunderbolt, GA.

Irene Pennington, Thunderbolt police chief said they’re still investigating the identity thefts, and expect to discover more victims. She also said they expect to arrest others suspected of being involved in the crimes.

LifeLock provides identity theft protection to nearly 1.5 million people in the United States. Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about their innovative and comprehensive services. Enroll using the LifeLock promotional code Defense to receive a huge discount.