Hacking and Identity Theft

I find the news of the two major hacks on Yahoo! to be bigger than most people. These hacks were unrecognized for years (supposedly happened in 2013 and 2014).

Many people use the same password on multiple sites – even banking.

With cloud and app usage increasing, more and more personal data is available to hackers, from credit card numbers at any online store to medical records. Add in all those contests and tests you see online and hackers have a full profile of you. Apparently, not many worry about this – until your identity is stolen and then it is too late.

THE SCOPE OF IDENTITY THEFT. “The 2016 Identity Fraud Study, released by Javelin Strategy & Research, found that $15 billion was stolen from 13.1 million U.S. consumers in 2015, compared with $16 billion and 12.7 million victims a year earlier.”

Much of this was used for Government documents or benefits fraud. However, “Eighty-six percent of the 17.6 million Americans who had their identity compromised during the last year said fraudsters tried to open up credit card or bank accounts in their name soon after, according to the report.”

“Yahoo’s priorities clearly did not include proactive protection of user information,” said Chenxi Wang, chief strategy officer at San Francisco cyber-security firm Twistlock. Truthfully, does any company have a clear priority for security?

Cyber-security is an expensive game of cat and mouse. Yahoo “invested more than $250 million in security initiatives across the company since 2012,” according to Reuters. Many companies opt for insurance instead of spending the money on the game. Yet companies don’t even do the basics, like force password changes every 90 days. Do they train their employees on phishing and other social engineering techniques that are the number 1 avenue for hacks?

LA County is just the latest event in a year that saw colleges, healthcare, Verizon, Y!, Oracle, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Cisco, dating sites and more got hacked. It isn’t IF, it is WHEN. And then it is: What will you do about it? Do something with the barn door before all the animals flee.

Tags: security
Related tags: identity theft, cyber security, identity, million, security, yahoo