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HACKERS TARGET HOME COMPUTERS
While large-scale hacker attacks on government institutions, financial services providers and other organizations that collect sensitive personal and financial information usually are the ones to make the headlines, home users are most often the target of Internet crime, according to a report released in September by Internet security firm Symantec Corp.

According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, hackers are increasingly targeting home computer users because they are less likely to have in place the kinds of security measures now deployed routinely on the networks of businesses and other organizations. In the first half of this year, attacks on home computers accounted for 86 percent of all targeted attacks.

"Attackers see end users as the weakest link in the security chain and are constantly targeting them in an effort to profit," said Arthur Wong, senior vice president of Symantec Security Response and Managed Services.

Financial gain is the most common motivation in targeted electronic attacks, Symantec said, with identity theft, fraud and data theft topping the list. The prevalence of "phishing" scams also is rising dramatically.

The basic phishing ploy involves mass distribution of e-mail messages disguised to look as if they come from legitimate businesses. The messages contain links to bogus Web sites designed to look like the sites of the targeted companies that are instead used to collect sensitive personal information such as credit card and Social Security numbers for fraudulent purposes. Symantec reported an 81 percent increase in the number of unique phishing messages sent in the first six months of 2006, as compared with the previous six months.

Unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly known as "spam," showed a slight increase in early 2006, as compared with last year, accounting for 54 percent of all e-mail traffic. On the relatively positive side, Symantec reports that many spammers with criminal intentions are choosing to exclude malicious code from the e-mail messages themselves in an attempt to bypass spam filtering software, instead including hyperlinks to Web sites hosting malicious code.

ADA DENTAL CLAIM FORM ONLINE
The ADA Dental Claim Form provides a common format for reporting dental services to a patient’s dental benefit plan. The most recent version of the form is available for review on ADA.org.

ADA policy promotes use and acceptance of the most current version of the ADA Dental Claim Form by dentists and payers. The latest version of the form enables reporting of a national provider identifier, in addition to a current proprietary provider identifier, for both the billing dentist/dental entity and for the treating dentist. This version of the form will be valid for use beginning Jan. 1, 2007.

Three samples of the ADA Dental Claim Form are available for review. For more information, visit "www.ada.org/goto/claimform".

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

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