Data Breaches Rarely Lead To Identity Theft
from the hype-and-reality dept
Earlier this year, it seemed like you could hardly go a day or two without hearing about yet another data leak by some company or another and how everyone's data was at risk. Of course, now some are beginning to realize that very few of those data leaks actually resulted in identity theft scams. Of course, that shouldn't necessarily make anyone feel better about them. It could just mean that so much private data about people is available that your chances of being "picked" are much slimmer. Safety thanks to the ubiquity of available information just isn't that comforting.
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Your Accounts have been Compromised!
Doing the math, the accounts of the average US citizen are compromised 1 or 2 times per year.
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Re: Your Accounts have been Compromised!
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Re: Your Accounts have been Compromised
If 2% of the accounts compromised is over 10 million, then 100% is over 500 million. This is almost twice the resident population of the United States.
The above doesn't change the fact that you still only have a 2% chance of being defrauded each year. Of course, maybe you plan to live a long time, in which case the odds don't look so good.
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Re: Your Accounts have been Compromised
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Numbers Misleading
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Re: Numbers Misleading
This Website details 50 Million Americans affected by data breaches in the 8 months to Oct 15 2005, only including reported computer breaches and not ordinary theft, fraud and wrongly-delivered post etc.
I hope it's clear that much more than "10mil of all american's data was compromised". The main issue with the math is whether you can believe the estimate "only about 2 percent of the accounts that are compromised are ever used fraudulently" from the original article. That's what makes the total 500 million compromised accounts.
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Re: Numbers Misleading
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Zzzz..
But information related to an individual's identity does not expire, it persists indefinitely. The social, maiden name, birth date and other pertinent information could be accessed readily at a later date. The ramifications remain the same 20 years after the theft as to the day it is first stolen. So the amount of time in this case is irrelevant, as is the article.
After reading I found it to be boring, the article's author spewing off a plethora of facts and figures, but drawing no conclusions from any of it. A rehash of what we've heard before.
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