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NEW YORK (AP) – Equifax 2017. Marriott 2018. Capital One 2019.
Data breaches resulting from hacking attacks are extremely common these days, and personal information about you may result in identity theft, such as credit cards and loans under your name. But it's hard to blame specific hacking because the most sophisticated criminals combine data from multiple attacks to better imitate you.
"That's why fraud can be an emotional challenge," said Kyle Marchini, fraud management specialist at the Javelin Financial Research Group. "It comes from nowhere, and there is no way of identifying where it comes from or what I could have done to prevent that."
While the number of reported offenses declined slightly last year to establish at 1,244, according to the Nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, the total number Exposed records more than doubled to reach 447 million. This suggests that hackers focus on larger organizations with larger gains. Last year's figures include data on approximately 383 million Marriott customers in a breach that, according to investigators, was linked to the Chinese government.
Criminal networks often buy datasets from multiple hacks to commit fraud. The idea is to collect enough information to allow banks and other institutions to perform previous identity and authentication checks. An old database with your social security number may have your old address, but hackers can simply subtract your old address from a newer database.
"We are in this vicious circle," said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Center Against Identity Theft. "We create, capture and use more and more data points on a specific person to fight against fraud and authenticate people, which in turn makes data more valuable to thieves. they will redouble their efforts to obtain them. "
Fraudulent card fees are relatively easy to reverse and US law limits credit card liability to consumers. But fraud involving new accounts is more difficult to manage.
Javelin estimates that the average victim spends 18 hours dealing with the fallout, including convincing collection agencies and credit rating agencies that the accounts were not really theirs. And the victims end up spending hundreds of dollars out of pocket. Javelin estimated that more than 3 million American adults had been victims of another new account fraud last year, nearly three times as much as in 2013.
Much of the increase can be attributed to the cumulative effect of data breaches and the types of information stolen.
Although credit card numbers and pbadwords can be changed, birth dates and social security numbers are usually left for life. And US pbadport numbers remain for 10 years. Hackers involved in the 2017 edition of the Equifax credit monitoring firm have secured all or part of that from 147 million people. Equifax last week agreed to pay at least $ 700 million to settle lawsuits.
A few days later, Capital One revealed a personal data breach of 106 million credit card holders or Capital One credit card applicants in the United States and Canada. Data included income, credit scores and self-reported account balances. Although Capital One stated that it did not believe that the information had been used for fraudulent purposes, the breach further increases the concern about data leaks – in this case, the types of information required to submit credit card applications.
"Every breach increases the risk because different pieces of information are disclosed," said Deepak Patel, vice president of the PerimeterX security company.
Beyond financial applications, personal data can be useful for telemarketing and email phishing scams, as scammers try to trick you into pretending that they already know you. And criminals armed with such data can pose as calls from financial institutions to transfer money or change their mailing address.
You can take precautions such as freezing your credit, which prevents thieves from opening new credit cards or new loans on your behalf. This is now free, but you will need to unlock your credit temporarily if you apply for a new credit card or loan.
You can also sign up for a credit monitoring service, which alerts you when someone pinges your credit report, pioneering the opening of a new account. There are also identity protection services that scan the Internet underground to make sure your personal data is on sale. Some of these services are available for free for customers who are victims of data breaches, including that of Equifax.
But Jason Wang, founder of TrueVault to help companies protect their data, said consumers can not do much once their data is in the wild. A better approach, he said, is to minimize the amount of data stored on servers – a California privacy law can do so if it takes effect as planned on January 1. Among other things, customers can search for business data and request removal – although businesses have nothing to do unless they get such requests.
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