Protect Yourself Against New ID Theft Schemes

Crooks are using more-sophisticated tricks to steal your data.

- LISA GERSTNER

Throughout the past decade, consumers have been rocked by one massive data breach after another. Some 500 million Yahoo users were hit by a 2014 data breach that compromised e-mail addresses, passwords and other information. The 2017 hack of credit bureau Equifax exposed Social Security numbers and other sensitive information of 147 million people. Thousands of other breaches exposed the data of millions of consumers, who have come to assume that their personal data has been laid bare somewhere.

Lately, however, fraudsters have shifted from large-scale hacks to more-focused attacks—on businesses in particular. In 2020, the total number of data breaches dropped by 19% compared with 2019, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. “Ransomware and phishing attacks directed at organizations are now the preferred method of data theft by cyber thieves,” the ITRC wrote in its 2020 Data Breach Report.