Everyone has heard of hacking. It's in the news all the time, often related to large corporations being hacked for their data. Since the reports are about corporations, as individuals it can seem like someone else's problem. But the information being stolen could be yours. Your Social Security number, credit card information, medical information--and pretty much any other personal data you can think of--can be hacked. If it does, your identity could be used to rack-up thousands of dollars of debt that you only find out about months later. On average, restoring your good name can take as much as 6,000 hours as well.
Although the government has been working day and night to fight it, busting these criminals could take several years, or sometimes, they can even live their own lives without being caught. For this reason, different public and private financial institutions with theft programs, such as the Federal Trade Commission's "AvoID Theft: Deter, Detect, Defend", are educating people to avoid identity theft while giving assistance to those who have victimized.
Steve Toporoff, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, says that while there is a feeling among industry insiders that child id theft is a major problem, it is very difficult to quantify because, in most instances, people have no clue that they are victims until years after the fact. A recent study based on identity scans of over 40,000 children in the U.S. conducted by Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon CyLab, found 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number. That figure is 51 times higher than the 0.2 percent rate for adults in the same population.
According to the Ponemon Institute, healthcare data breaches alone were up 32 percent and the average data breach loss cost $7.2 million in 2010. The Identity Theft Resource Center stated that the theft of medical data increased by 50 percent in 2011.
Using the FTC identity theft program can help other organizations hold seminars and distribute educational materials about fighting identity theft. Since education is the only key to avoiding this crime, consumers can now be aware on how to identify these problems and take immediate actions if ever they become a victim of identity theft.
Although the government has been working day and night to fight it, busting these criminals could take several years, or sometimes, they can even live their own lives without being caught. For this reason, different public and private financial institutions with theft programs, such as the Federal Trade Commission's "AvoID Theft: Deter, Detect, Defend", are educating people to avoid identity theft while giving assistance to those who have victimized.
Steve Toporoff, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, says that while there is a feeling among industry insiders that child id theft is a major problem, it is very difficult to quantify because, in most instances, people have no clue that they are victims until years after the fact. A recent study based on identity scans of over 40,000 children in the U.S. conducted by Richard Power, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon CyLab, found 10.2 percent of the children in the report had someone else using their Social Security number. That figure is 51 times higher than the 0.2 percent rate for adults in the same population.
According to the Ponemon Institute, healthcare data breaches alone were up 32 percent and the average data breach loss cost $7.2 million in 2010. The Identity Theft Resource Center stated that the theft of medical data increased by 50 percent in 2011.
Using the FTC identity theft program can help other organizations hold seminars and distribute educational materials about fighting identity theft. Since education is the only key to avoiding this crime, consumers can now be aware on how to identify these problems and take immediate actions if ever they become a victim of identity theft.
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Learn more about identity theft. Stop by Anna Grange's site where you can find out all about credit identity theft and how to avoid becoming a victim.
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