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So you found yourself plunged into another data breach. At least, that's what the notification you just received tells you. You know, email that starts with "We take your privacy seriously."
Offense notifications can leave victims feeling overwhelmed and confused. A tool designed by the Identity Theft Resource Center is designed to make the experience, unfortunately inevitable, less stressful.
Breach Clarity badyzes breaches of publicly disclosed data and provides concrete advice to victims based on risk. It relies on a comprehensive database of resource center-managed violations and applies an algorithm that weighs the risks.
"People want to know: it's your risk, and that's the way you treat it," said Eva Velasquez, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center.
Breach Clarity is the latest consumer-driven service to help users navigate the complex and disoriented reality of online life today. Everyone has been hacked, an old cyber security has seen, it's just a question of whether you know it or not.
You can already know if you have lost your login credentials and other confidential information by visiting Have been sent or Firefox Monitor. Breach Clarity goes one step further by helping you decide what to do next. The growing number of these tools is increasing the ability of consumers to respond to data breaches. So, you do not have to sit angry and confused the next time you receive a data breach notification.
It's not an easy task to decide how to react to a data breach. Experts Know Data Breaches Help Criminals remove the theft of identity and a host of other financial crimes. But it is difficult to predict what they are likely to do with a given set of stolen data.
To provide useful advice, Breach Clarity relies on an algorithm to badyze the type of data stolen and predict the types of crimes that data would allow. The results may be surprising, said Jim Van Dyke, an independent data badysis expert whose team has created the algorithm.
For example, Home Depot offers free credit monitoring to victims of a 2014 violation during which hackers stole millions of credit card numbers. But credit monitoring is the best solution to protect identity thieves who open new credit lines, which, according to Van Dyke's algorithm, is not the biggest risk for data breach victims .
Instead, criminals were more likely to try to make purchases with existing cards and bank accounts of the victims. To avoid this type of behavior, Breach Clarity recommends that victims of hacking create alerts on their account and request the reissue of their cards.
The algorithm is dynamic, and Van Dyke and his team will update it as criminals change their modus operandi. Van Dyke determines what changes are needed by interviewing experts in financial crime and incorporating new information into the algorithm. Finally, he would like to grant a license to use a version of this tool to financial institutions. The consumer version is free.
"If thieves want to exploit our data to harm us," said Velasquez. "We should take advantage just as much to try to stop this damage."
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