The chances your identity will be stolen via online hacking are disturbingly high. There are things you can do about it. FromMark Nestmann at internationalman.com:
The state of online security is so dismal that it’s not a matter of if your identity will be stolen. The only uncertainty is when it will happen – and how often.
Welcome to what I call Hacker World, where malicious web-savvy thieves can steal virtually any asset, file false tax refund claims, and even steal your Social Security benefits.
Recently, I learned that I almost certainly had my identity stolen, for at least the second time. The first time that I know about was in the massive Equifax data breach in 2017.
This time around, it was stolen from Marriot International. Last December, Marriot disclosed that hackers penetrated the company’s Starwood guest reservation database and stole the personal data of as many as 500 million people.
Marriot says hackers accessed customer names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers, and dates of birth – all information that can easily be exploited to impersonate someone. About 8.6 million encrypted payment card numbers and expiration dates were also exposed.
You might be surprised to learn that I’m not especially concerned about this latest breach. One big reason is that when I learned my data had been stolen from Equifax 18 months ago, I put a security freeze on my credit files.
A security freeze limits access to your credit report to only companies that already have you as a customer. If you have a security freeze in effect and a hacker penetrates a database to retrieve your personal information and succeeds in impersonating you, they’ll find it almost impossible to benefit financially from having your information.
