Do You Ever Shop Anywhere? Congratulations: Your Data Will Be Hacked
by Kate Cox, Consumerist
By the numbers alone, basically everyone in the country has been the victim of at least one data breach in the past year, if not more. 106 million Americans had their card data stolen from Target and Home Depot alone, to say nothing of the data breaches at Jimmy John’s, Dairy Queen, P.F. Chang’s, UPS, Albertsons, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Shaw’s, Sally Beauty Supply, Goodwill, some Marriott hotels, Neiman Marcus, and Michael’s craft stores. And that isn’t even considering other breaches that were too small to make national headlines, or that simply haven’t been discovered yet.
Websites, online services, and databases get hacked too, of course, as Chase, Adobe, and Sony could unhappily tell you. But hacks in good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar retail stores have skyrocketed in recent years. And it’s not just about how often they happen; it’s about how widespread they are able to become.
So if you, as you replace your credit card for the third time in a year, are tempted to shout to the sky, “Why?! Why does this keep happening? Make it stop!,” then read on.
Tags: Credit Cards, Data Breach