A new study says that roughly half of American adults' personal information was exposed to hackers in the last 12 months.
Cyber attacks are not new to anyone who is an internet user. With a significant rise in data breaches in the United States from hackers and other organizations for various business practices such as targeted advertising, concerns about it are growing among people. But that hasn't stopped the hackers from getting inside the accounts of millions of U.S. adults.
A latest research by Ponemon Institute for CNN Money, says roughly half of the US citizens have fallen prey to hackers who have exposed the personal information of 110 million Americans in just the past 12 months. But what's more shocking is the total number of accounts hacked in the past year, which is about 432 million. The massive figure includes the data breaches of major organizations such as Target, eBay and Snapchat.
According to CNN Money, hackers have gained access to personal information ranging from names, debit or credit card numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, account passwords, security questions and postal addresses. The exposure puts the victims at a greater risk of becoming easy targets for scams and identity thefts.
The report also put together a list of data breaches from retailers and companies that store users' personal information. According to CNN Money, 70 million Target customers' personal information and 40 million credit and debit cards were compromised during last year's data breach. Similarly, 33 million Adobe customers' credentials and 3.2 million credit and debit cards were hacked . 4.6 million of Snapchat users' account information, 3 million card payments used at Michaels, 1.1 million cards in Neiman Marcus and a massive chunk of AOL's 120 million account holders and almost all of eBay's 148 million customers were exposed in the hands of hackers.
CNN Money also highlighted that the hacks are becoming so common that people are now becoming immune to such reports. Unisys researchers call this a "data-breach fatigue."
In April AOL was targeted and in May it was eBay's turn. CNN warns consumers to be prepared for June. Changing the password to a unique set of characters, symbols and numbers, wherever supported, is a good start to fight cyber attacks.
