Your credit score is a number, usually between 300 and 850, calculated based on your credit report. Your credit score is used by creditors to determine your credit worthiness, the amount of credit they would qualify you for, and the interest rate. The higher your credit score, the better is your credit rating. One common score that most lenders use is the FICO score. For a fee, you can get your FICO score at www.myfico.com.

• Who Uses Credit Scores: Credit scores are used by money lenders, banks, credit card companies, mortgage companies, creditors, landlords, insurance companies, utility companies, and many employers to evaluate your credit worthiness.
  
• How Often Can My Credit Score Change? Credit score is computed based on the data supplied by information providers such as creditors, merchants, banks, credit card companies, landlords, etc. As a result, your credit scores can change from day to day.
  

The term Identity Theft spans over a whole range of crimes resulting from breach of privacy. Even though protecting your personal and financial information is becoming increasingly difficult, there are several steps that you can take to improve your chances -by a great extent if I may add -of safe-guarding your private/confidential data from prying eyes.

Internet has further compounded this problem by placing all our corporate and personal computer networks and our datastores only a few hops away from those hacking away relentlessly from remote parts of the world. However, there are quite a few simple steps that you can take to bolster your defenses against identity thieves -regardless of whether they are home-grown or international identity thieves.

Here are a few simple ways to ward off identity theft: