Mike Hughlett | (TNS) The Minnesota Star Tribune
I almost threw away the mailing I got in mid-July from MNGI Digestive Health. I couldn’t remember ever patronizing the place. Must be more junk mail.
Then I remembered I’d recently written about MNGI and another Twin Cities medical firm, Consulting Radiologists. They had both been hacked, together exposing personal data of over 1 million people. Turns out I was one of them.
Like millions of Americans, I faced the specter of identity theft. So, I set out to discover more about this increasingly common scourge. I found useful tips — and sobering information about the market for stolen data.
Tracing identity theft to any particular data breach is difficult, said James Lee, chief operating officer of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit group based in California. “But we do know that data breach information is the fuel for most identity theft crimes.”
Through the first half of 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center tracked 1,571 U.S. data breaches — 13% higher than the first six months of 2023, a year that ended with a record number of hacks. Over 1 billion people had their data compromised in breaches through June.
In February, an arm of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group was hit by one of the largest U.S. data hacks ever, involving tens of millions of people. In June and July respectively, Consulting Radiologists and then MNGI Digestive disclosed data breaches affecting, respectively, 584,000 and 766,000 people.
In August, three more Minnesota health care providers reported data breaches involving more than 35,000 people: Park Dental (238,667); Fraser Child and Family Center (67,000); and the Dental Specialists (38,442). There have been many more significant Minnesota hacks over the past couple of years.
Companies and governments often struggle for months to determine the nature and extent of a data breach. It took MNGI 11 months. So, your stolen data could be available to fraudsters for a long time before you even know about it.
“Welcome to the new way of life, where no one is safe,” said Bob Doyle of Savage, who recently got two letters saying his data had been breached, including from Consulting Radiologists. “The long-held belief of being safe at home has been blown up.”
How to decipher your notice
A consumer’s data breach odyssey usually starts with a letter from a hacked company or an alert from a credit monitoring service. (The Identity Theft Resource Center, which assists victims and conducts research, has a primer on what to do when you get a notice. )
In a breach letter, companies are required by law to say what happened, why it happened and how consumers can protect themselves, said Michael Bruemmer, Experian’s head of global data breach resolution.
The letters often have contact information for Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, the three major U.S. credit bureaus. By law, consumers can get one free credit report annually from each of them.
Breach notifications are typically thin on how a hack occurred. And over the past three years, they have become thinner due to court decisions that encourage companies …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
