ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It's looking like we're going to see a record number of data breaches in 2022.
The Operations Team at The Identity Theft Resource Center has been tracking the numbers and it found that already this year, there have been more than 400 data compromises. That's 14 percent more than the same time last year. More than 20 million Americans have been impacted. Here in Florida, more than 88 percent of breaches involve cyberattacks as opposed to a system or human mistake.
So what can you do about it?
Chief Operating Officer James Lee says bad actors are changing their tactics and becoming more sophisticated while looking for specific information.
He says Social Security numbers are worth $2 or less on the dark web and some hackers are even giving them away for free. Instead, they're looking for some information they deem much more valuable.
"Your Gmail login and password is worth between $60 and $80," Lee said, adding that driver's licenses are valuable, too. "Now, we're using [driver's licenses] in electronic forms, using them in a lot of verifications. A driver's license can be worth between $100 and $150, just your driver's license number, so we have to think differently about what is important and treat every piece of information as being valuable and worth of protection,"
It's up to the states to have laws about what companies tell you about breaches. Here in Florida, companies are required to tell you about a breach within 30 days if there's a problem involving your name, along with your Social Security number, driver's license or financial information, among other things. Lee says there needs to be a national law, at a minimum, forcing companies to quickly share what was exposed and how it was exposed so people know how to respond to an attack.
"If there were 20 million other kind of crime victims in one quarter, we would be moving heaven and earth to help them but we don’t have an infrastructure to help identity crime victims and we need to," Lee said.
Here are two things you can do right now:
- Make sure you have a unique password for every account, the average person has about 100 of them
- That password needs to have 12 characters including a number or a symbol. The longer that password, the better. Lee says it could takes decades to hack.