The most recent panel on “Meeting Terrorism’s Challenges,” which periodically take place in the Boettcher Auditorium, focused on the issues of identity theft and cyber crime as well as their correlation to terrorism.The panel was moderated by Rahmat Shoureshi, the dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Sciences.The panel included University of Denver professor Ramki Thurimella, J. David Unruh of Lockheed Martin Corporation, Jeff Tricoli of the FBI, and John Suthers, the attorney general of Colorado.The major types of cyber crime include computer hacking or network intrusion, Internet fraud, virus spreading, the theft of confidential information and cyber spies.Cyber crimes are costing Americans billions of dollars every year. In 2005 alone, $67.2 billion were reported in computer-related damages.Hackers are also becoming an increasing problem for the U.S. government. Hackers calling themselves “Titan Rain” stole multiple U.S secrets in 2004. These secrets include the specs for aviation mission planning for army helicopters, the FalcolnView 3.2, and military flight planning software.Colorado ranks fifth in the country in victims of cyber crimes so this is an increasingly important issue for Coloradoans. Identity theft costs Americans as a whole $55 billion a year. Twenty-five percent of all identity theft involves credit cards while twenty percent involves bank accounts. Attorney General Suthers stressed that 60 percent of identity theft does not occur through hackers but through people taking documents out of the trash, so destroying important documents instead of throwing them away greatly reduces a person’s risk of identity theft.The U.S. government believes that through security breaches in major corporations 50 million Social Security numbers have been lost, stolen or exposed to hackers.The actual number of victims of identity thefts is unknown.As of July 2005 dozens of bills to help fight cyber crime and protect people from hackers are pending in Congress, and according to Suthers their passing seems inevitable.Suthers also discussed how the 9/11 Commission report found a clear connection between terrorism and identity fraud. Every act of terrorism against the United States has been made using fake or stolen identification.The Al-Qaeda training manual requires its members to leave their training camp with no less then five fake identities.There also appears to be evidence that terrorists use identity theft to fund their cause.A national identification card may be the only solution to preventing much of identity theft, but it is not anything that is likely to happen anytime soon.Tricoli of the FBI discussed how with the collapse of the Soviet Union identity theft has grown into a huge underground market in Eastern Europe.It is even possible to go on Google and find sites displaying credit card numbers.Since companies have become smarter in protecting themselves individual people have become the easy targets and thousands of machines are being infected and it is the end-users who are suffering now.People interested in learning more about cyber crime and identity theft and how to better protect themselves should go to www.rmchd.com.