One of the things we stress repeatedly in this blog is how important it is to keep personally identifiable information safe. It’s the main goal of our software, ID Shield, that reads documents in a fraction of the time it would take a human, as it points out and redacts sensitive information along the way.
The basic assumption underlying this mission is that cybercriminals are out to get your personal information, wherever it may show up. It’s common in public documents like land records, court records, death certificates, and credit card information, and criminals will scour the internet for any type of record that might contain your data.
You might be wondering though, what thieves are doing with your information; their motivations, the end result. Recently, Texas A&M University professor Ravi Sen looked into data from Verizon’s annual data breach report and found some answers.
It’s important to know that data breaches are quite common. While we’re not at levels that are all-time highs, billions of records are still exposed annually, worldwide. The minority of them are the hacks you hear about with grand narratives laced with revenge and espionage like hacks at Sony and Marriott, respectively. The majority, 86% according to Verizon’s recent report, are simply about money. Data breaches don’t tend to be fly-by-night operations either, as more than half of them are committed by organized criminal groups.
The initial hack is where you hear the headline number, referring to the millions of records that have been exposed. That’s also where the economy of all this information picks up. Bulk data hacks usually and up going one of two routes. The hackers may encrypt the data, locking out companies unless they pay a ransom. In healthcare, the cost of attacks like these was $21B last year alone, including ransoms paid and other expenses. The other avenue is to sell the data to buyers, usually on the dark web, that range from marketing firms to identity thieves.
It’s at this stage that the hack will have financial repercussions for those whose data has been exposed. Identity thieves may try to make fraudulent purchases or open up new lines of credit while inboxes fill with spam messages and phishing attempts to further compromise your data.
To stop these criminals from using your data, you’ll need to know if it’s been exposed which certain credit monitoring and independent organizations can help with. If your data has been compromised, you can notify credit agencies, your bank, or any other potential affected groups or work with identity theft prevention companies on keeping your information secure.
At Extract, we try to stop cases of identity theft before they start. That’s why we work with hundreds of state and local governments to automatically find sensitive information within their documents, removing it entirely before files are ever available. If you have documents with sensitive information and would like to see a better way of ensuring it’s safe, please reach out today.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.