Shutting the Door on Hackers, Once and For All.
“Identity Theft is the Fastest Growing Crime in America.”
I’ve been hearing this phrase lately, all over the internet. In light of all of the recent web attacks, like NotPetya and WannaCry, I am beginning to think that this phrase may in fact, be true. Did you know that there are upwards of 15 million U.S. citizens that suffer from fraud and identity theft a year? And that’s only in the U.S.
That means if you’re sitting in a room of five people – two of those are victims.
There are hackers from all over the world, breaking into large information and high security databases, to either hold information for a ransom or steal private personal information. Someone hacks your database. Then, a couple months down the road, you find out that someone in another country has been using your identity for all kinds of things. When it comes to highly sensitive government documents – these often contain personal information like Social Security Numbers, financial account numbers, names of minor, dates of birth and home addresses. You don’t want that information in the hands of somebody else.
It’s important now, more than ever, that government offices should be training their staff to know how to properly report and recognize identity theft. If there was a procedure in place that stops hackers from stealing personal information, then perhaps, identity theft would cease to exist.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission was so focused on stopping identity theft for businesses and organizations, that they wrote an entire how-to guide revolving around this topic. They use a rule called the “Red Flags Rule”, which requires identity theft prevention plans to be written. If government offices hopped on this bandwagon and began to write their own policies and procedures around identity theft: what to do when you notice it, how to report it, what to do if you missed it and how to clean up the damage, then citizens may sleep a little sounder.
However, putting a rule in place doesn’t solve this issue…
…if the software you are using isn’t secure. In a recent scholarly paper, “Defending Our Data: The Need for Information We Do Not Have” by Richard Warner and Robert H. Sloan, they say,
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“Think of a vulnerability as an unlocked door. The hacker finds it and walks in. Software programs currently contain an unacceptable number of unlocked doors.”
That’s where Extract’s Automated Data Redaction software comes into play. If the software is the issue, let’s nip it in the bud. Extract helped reduce Montgomery County, Ohio’s identity theft complaints. They had over 7,000 complaints filed in 2007. In 2008, they implemented a rule to redact private information for documents that were made public to the internet. You can read more about Montgomery County’s process here.
Extract is the fastest, most accurate redaction software. The redaction solution guarantees 99% post-verification accuracy and stays up-to-date with redaction law changes. Using proven rulesets from over 300 customers today, it supports privacy standards in all 50 states and still allow the rules to be easily tailored to customer-specific requirements.
