" Take charge of your Technology "
When a big data breach makes the news, there’s one thing that can get lost in the noise — the harm that hacking causes regular people like you. Experts tend to focus on the number of people whose records hackers stole, or whether the breached company could have prevented the hack. Those are important questions, but you can be forgiven for wondering what they have to do with you. What, really, is the worst that could happen to you personally?
Plenty, according to consumer advocates. That’s because data breaches make crimes such as identity theft and other scams much easier for criminals to carry out. That includes the blockbuster data breaches of 2018, like when sophisticated attackers breached millions of Facebook accounts in September, or when a hacker accessed information from 27 million Ticketfly accounts in May or when a database of information on 19.4 million California voters held by the Sacramento Bee was stolen and held for ransom.
After your data gets stolen, it often goes up for sale on black market websites, where criminals can buy it and then pretend to be you.
“With the invention of the internet, we’ve built this Amazon for fraudsters,” said Eva Velasquez, president of the Identity Theft Resource Center.
But you don’t see that part of the equation happen. Maybe you hear about a data breach, and then later you experience identity theft. What happened in between is anyone’s guess.
Call or email us for free advice and recommendations
