In the past couple of years, there have been more and more
hacker attacks, leading us as consumers to feel a little uneasy. As a society,
we almost seem desensitized to the news on TV at this point, and the only time
we take real notice is when the brand that has been hacked is one that we
frequent. Even then our brain signals us to be concerned for a little while,
but as a group, we continue to shop ‘til we drop. From time-to-time we wonder,
where does our information go once it is stolen?
They sell it.
End of story, but really, that is what they do with it.
Everything has a price tag on it these days and like a knockoff Rolex, you can
buy it on the black market. There are international trading sites that are the
marketplace of choice for those both shopping for and selling the stolen data.
In early 2014, RAND Corporation’s National Security and Research Division reported that the trade of names and information has become more profitable than illegal drug trading.
Like trading baseball cards, in these black market trading
grounds some information is more valuable than others. For instance, medical
records are worth far more money than credit card information. Why you may ask?
Unlike a credit card number that can easily be canceled at
any point in time, medical records are solid and cannot be changed. Gaining
someone’s personal health information exposes things like date of birth, full
name, social security number, address, and even more information that can allow
someone to create a fake you. This allows the person to apply for credit cards,
loans, heck even government issued ID’s. Now that is scary.
According to Don
Jackson, Director of Threat Intelligence at PhishLabs, medical records can
trade at more than 10 times the dollar amount of a credit card or user name and
password credentials.
The social network effect
In 2012, Russian Hackers stole 6 million passwords from
LinkedIn and eHarmony, this may not seem very serious since there is not a lot
of pertinent information that could be had from these websites. Both are social
networks, one with your work history and the other with descriptions that may
sound more like the classic Rupert Holmes song about Pina Coladas, but that is
not the data they are after. Breaking in and obtaining these passwords has more
to do with gaining the user names and passwords than anything else. The hackers
have hopes that you are like the typical computer user and use those
credentials on other sites allowing them to access your accounts freely and
sell them on the black market.
Personal insight
While researching to write this blog article it made me
think about my account information and passwords, it inspired me to go in and
change almost all of my passwords to unique account passwords. I suggest you do
the same to protect yourself from identity theft. This can be a very effective
way to protect yourself, and on accounts that offer a two-step or two-factor
authentication option it is definitely a best practice to enable this feature.
By adding two-factor authentication to your account you can ensure that you are
doing everything you can to protect yourself online.
How many passwords do you use?
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