Cybersecurity Awareness Month – Identity Theft Statistics

Statistics on ID Theft:

• As of June 2022, there are 2.4 million cases of identity theft.
• Credit card fraud tops the 2022 list of ID theft with 230,937 reports.
• Identity theft mainly affects people falling in the age bracket of 30-39.

Identity Theft Continues Unabated

Sobering statistics above.  Company breaches continued throughout the pandemic and beyond.  This wealth of private consumer information is a treasure trove of identity theft materials.  Identity theft breaches often cause great harm as hackers convert financial records such as salaries, social security numbers, names, addresses, and birth dates into ID theft.

CyberHoot recommends you freeze your credit at all the credit agencies (see list of links below) in order to prevent hackers from querying your credit history and ultimately taking out credit in your name, or worse stealing your identity outright.  Additionally, many insurance policies can have an identity theft rider added the assist you in recovering your identity if you become victimized.

In addition to these personal protective measures, companies should consider the following best practices to protect themselves from giving up our critical personal details to begin with.  Consider signing up with CyberHoot today to better protect yourself and stop being part of the problem with Identity Theft.

CyberHoot Best practices:

1. Train your employees on the common attacks that are out there.  From weak passwords and password managers, to the importance of multi-factor authentication and how to spot phishing attacks.  Awareness is the key to defending your business.
2. Govern you employees with cybersecurity policies including Acceptable Use, Password, Information Handling and a Written Information Security Policy.
3. Establish cybersecurity best practice processes such as a Vulnerability Alert Management Process (VAMP) and a Cybersecurity Incident Management Process (CIMP) to guide and require action in the face of an emergency.  Then move on onboarding and offboarding processes, SaaS management processes, and 3rd party risk management.
4. Establish strong technical protections including: a Firewall, antivirus, anti-malware, anti-spam, multi-factor authentication on all critical accounts,  Enable full disk encryption, manage the keys carefully, and most importantly, adopt, train on and require all employees to use a Password Manager.
5. Test employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks.  CyberHoot has released a disruptive method of Phish Testing the fills in gaps in your employees knowledge without punishing them for failure.  Instead we reward them for success.  More info is available here.
6. Backup your data by following our 3-2-1 Backup methodology to ensure you can recover your business from a cybersecurity event.
7. In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections) or prohibiting their use entirely.
8. If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.
9. Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.

CyberHoot believes that for many small to medium sized businesses and MSPs, you can greatly improve your defenses and chances of not becoming another victim of cyberattack if you follow the advice above.