2019 Joint Conference ILA/NLA/NSLA

Everyone is aware of the personal and financial havoc identity theft can cause, however identity thieves are also interested in library accounts and the access these accounts give them to intellectual content. Much has been written about phishing schemes that harvest library users’ credentials and passwords, and use them to download large amounts of library’s licensed online content, but over the past year, the University of Nebraska’s Interlibrary Loan staff have noticed smaller scale instances of identity theft. These stolen credentials were used to access patrons’ Interlibrary Loan accounts and place fraudulent requests. We will share the methods used to identify these suspicious requests and how they were distinguished from legitimate request traffic. We will outline the short term steps taken to protect the compromised patron accounts and prevent new bogus requests. We will also describe the broader measures our institution is taking to change our patron authentication process to protect patrons' identity.