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Showing posts from August, 2015
 According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) today, there has been 519 data breaches -- a record number -- reported thus far in 2015.  Businesses and the healthcare industry account for nearly 75% of the reported breaches, with banking accounting for another 9%, and education and government breaches accounting for the balance of 16%.    Of course, these are just the reported breaches.  Some entities choose not to report them, or they haven't been discovered yet.  Historically, many months go by before breaches are discovered.   Without trying to sound like a salesman, it is no longer a valid option to ignore identity theft, hoping it won't happen.  All of us have had our information compromised.  It is just a matter of whether our information will be used in a fraud.  If you do not have a strong identity theft protection service, get one. I recommend IDShield from LegalShield.  Take a look at it at my website http://IDSolutions.us.  Don't wait until you find out

American Airlines, United Airlines, and Sabre Reservations Hit by China-Tied Hackers

It was just announced that United Airlines, Sabre Corp, and likely American Airlines, may have been hacked some time ago, probably at or near the same time that Anthem HealthCare and the OPM were hacked, according to folks knowledgeable of the cybersecurity probes.  Quite possibly, the hackers moved through the Sabre system into the American Airlines system, since they share some infrastructure.  The digital "fingerprints" of the hackers, while not identical in each of the systems, are close enough to say they were from the same group.  For example, hacker IP addresses in the American Airlines breach were the same as those in the government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack. Information stolen from Sabre included the reservation records on more than a billion travelers per year across the globe and may be combined with the United and American Airlines flight manifests and passenger info and the OPM breach data to blackmail executives and government officials o

The OPM Breach Is A Major Security Exposure & Risk

In April, 2015, it was discovered -- almost by accident -- that 4.2 million current and former government employees had been stolen.  Bad as that was, in June, it was revealed that the real number was over 21 million, which included people who had applied for government jobs or had background checks and their families.  Stolen information included Social Security numbers, birthdays, home addresses, user names and passwords, background information, and even fingerprints. Although the original 4.2 million victims have been notified if they were affected, so far, no one has been notified from the larger group. The forensics suggest that the Chinese were behind the breach, but no one is officially pursuing the Chinese for this. Along with the risk of financial misuse, victims whose background information was stolen could potentially be blackmailed, since looking for compromising situations were why they were having the background checks in the first place. So if you were -- or t

The Current State Of Things

Well, I haven't died.  Just lost track of time, I suppose.  Got focused on other outlets for my thoughts. But now I need to dust off the blog and start communicating again on this topic. Identity theft is much worse than when I last took keyboard in hand and made a posting here in 2012. Much worse. Just in 2014, one of the largest breaches in history occurred when Anthem Blue Cross was hacked.  Over 80 million records were stolen -- that is 1 in every 4 Americans -- with critical pieces of personal information compromised, such as Social Security Number, birthday, and medical card, to mention a few. Late last year also was the announcement that the IRS was compromised, with  tax information stolen from over 200,000 individuals. Most recently, the government's Office of Personnel Management was hacked, exposing the personal information of over 14 million people. (I'll say more about this breach an another blog post.) The severity of the breaches is staggering.  Gone are