TROY — Nearly 2 billion people had their most private information compromised last year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.
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As reported on News Center 7 at 5:30 p.m., from healthcare to city governments to even local schools, it seems nowhere is safe from a data breach.
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News Center 7 previously reported that earlier this year Troy City Schools was a part of a nationwide data breach impacting the PowerSchool software.
“It essentially manages all of our student data, demographic data, school data a wide variety of things,” Troy City Schools Superintendent Chris Piper said.
Names and addresses were some of the data accessed in the breach.
The Identity Theft Resource Center found that there were more the 3,100 data breaches last year.
“We’re at the point where only about 20% of the population
does not receive a data breach notice every year,” Identity Theft Resource Center President James Lee said.
Data breaches are impacting more victims than ever before, more than 1.7 billion victims received notices last year.
“We had a significant number of what we’re calling mega breaches,” Lee said.
The Identity Theft Resource Center says hackers are focused on larger companies in five main areas: Financial Services, Healthcare, Professional Services, Manufacturing, and Education.
“Data breaches are at the root cause now of virtually every cybercrime,” Lee said.
Data breaches give cybercriminals the means to contact you and what to contact you about.
This allows scammers to not just use your data but use what they know about you to gain even more access to what you have worked so hard to get.
The Identity Theft Resource Center suggests you set up a passkey by using facial or fingerprint recognition as part of your two-factor authentication.
That way, if your password gets leaked there is still an extra layer of security.
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