Identity Theft

Each year your businesses struggle with rising cases of identity theft and it’s affecting everything.  ID Theft can be detrimental to your employees, productivity, your reputation, revenue, and profit.     You take all the necessary measures to secure your systems and prevent data breach incidents.  But what about personal data stolen from elsewhere?  Is your company being defrauded by that data?  What can you do to prevent identity fraud despite business efforts to protect their information assets?   What is happening? Insider solo hackers and criminal gangs steal millions of consumer records each year from companies around the globe.  Bad actors take advantage of weaknesses in the system security and operations.  The stolen information is traded on the dark web and used by identity thieves around the world to quickly defraud businesses, governments, and individuals.  They, under someone else’s name: open new credit lines empty bank accounts seek expensive medical services receive […]

The Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced in its annual report that they “uncovered $2.3 billion in tax fraud during the 2020 fiscal year”. (IRS Releases Annual Report Identifying $2.3 Billion in Tax Fraud).  These numbers put Tax and Unemployment fraud at epidemic levels! The IRS said that its focus included Covid-19-related fraud, cybercrime, and other identity theft-related tax crimes. Further explaining that their investigation into the Dark Web includes “terrorist financing cyber-enabled campaigns” where U.S. authorities seized millions of dollars.  The IRS was able to take over 300 cryptocurrency accounts, four websites, and four Facebook pages all related to the criminal activity. Then in January of this year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its annual identity theft and fraud report known as the “FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book” (2020 FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book). The 2021 FTC report states that identity theft was […]

According to a recently released report by Risk Based Security (2020 Sees Huge Increase in Records Exposed in Data Breaches), “the volume of publicly disclosed data breaches fell by 48% in 2020 compared with the previous year, leading to 3,932 in total.”  That’s the good news. But the total number of breached records skyrocketed in 2020. “…the volume of records that were compromised by these breaches jumped by 141% to a whopping 37 billion records.  This was the largest number ever seen by Risk Based Security since 2005.” That’s the bad news.  Security experts say this can be explained by criminals getting more targeted in their efforts.  Now they are focusing on ransomware and business email scams which require little data to be successful. The staggering increase in breached records can be also be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Many organizations were forced to relax their security policies.  Businesses for […]

I was recently asked, “Is Your Digital Identity Safe?” The short answer is “no”. Two aspects of the issue One, take a look at today’s threat environment for businesses.  There is a huge discrepancy between the marketing of information technology security and the reality of data breaches. Two, look at the threat consumers must deal with.  Again, a huge discrepancy between the marketing of identity theft protection services and the reality of ID theft Victims. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are getting better at hacking, and data breaches can happen to anyone, just look at the recent headlines: US Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise FireEye, a Top Security Firm, Says It Was Hacked by a Nation-State Spotify Security Vulnerability Exposed Personal-Data A worldwide hacking campaign with ties to Russia has cybersecurity experts trying to figure out what happened.  Further, how much of the United States government may have been affected and […]

The Cyber Threat Landscape Will Get Worse Before (and if) it Gets Better! Based on the three “headline news” articles below, I believe no one organization can prevent a data breach event: FBI, CISA warn of impending ransomware attacks on hospitals Security Experts Alarmed By Broken Cyber Market We are outnumbered – cybersecurity pros face a huge staffing shortage as attacks surge during the pandemic To prove this point, while the total number of data breaches was down in the first six months of 2020, over 27 billion records have been exposed so far this year (please see here) which is more than four times higher than any previously reported equivalent time period. This leads me to believe two things: All the financial and IT resources of the U.S. government and private industry – no organization can prevent a data breach. Cyber threats and attacks are no longer just a technology risk […]