IDStrong Data Breach Tracker
Modern marketing forces businesses to collect data on their client base. Information like birthdays, contact information, gender, and shopping preferences allow organizations to create detailed profiles and improve their overall strategy.
This practice raises questions about the ethicality of targeted marketing but also introduces another dangerous consequence: Cybercriminals arguably better leverage this practice of exhaustive data collection.
Since 2016, over 1,000 data breaches were reported annually, with over 3,200 data breaches occurring in 2023, an increase of about 72 percent from the previous year. Corporate compromise isn't going anywhere. Social engineering and black hat hackers are becoming more sophisticated, leaving small and medium-sized businesses playing catch-up.
A severe breach can compromise consumers' credit card and banking details. However, a breach doesn't have to fully penetrate a system to uncover dangerous information. The most basic information, like a birth year, allows criminals to craft more believable phishing schemes.
Additionally, consumers' information can float around the dark web for years before finding use. This means that data breach victims must remain forever vigilant for attacks on their identity, whether those be spam emails, unknown credit lines, or fraudulent text messages.
Businesses have a legal obligation to report data breaches promptly. However, this obligation is one-sided and doesn't require the victim to confirm they received the communication. Many people sign up for services with burner emails or change their phone numbers over time.
In these cases, consumers could go their entire lives without realizing their data was compromised in a breach.
Dedicated tools like IDStrong's Data Breach Tracker are the best places to turn in these situations. This service takes the user's personal identifiers and repeatedly searches for instances of them on the dark web. Users receive a ping whenever their email, name, phone number, or other dangerous elements are found online.
This knowledge allows victims to act immediately and raise their vigilance in daily life. Prepared individuals are more likely to recognize signs of identity theft, including unexplained financial transactions or missing mail. Knowing their information is at risk from a data breach also encourages victims to routinely request credit reports.
While a ding from the data breach tracker doesn't mean an identity is already compromised, it is prudent to set a credit freeze. This is easily accomplished by contacting any of the three major credit bureaus, and they will contact the other two on the victim's behalf.
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