Here we go again. Somebody stole 2.4 billion records of private information from an organization that calls itself National Public Data (NPD), and NPD did a lousy job dealing with it. What a surprise. Krebs on Security published the best stories about what happened in his August 15, 2024 article and August 19 followup. Here are some another good articles from Dark Reading, Wired, and a great explanatory blog post from Troy Hunt.
Vineeta, and everyone, ask what we can do about this. Yes, we can call the credit reporting agencies and freeze our credit. I did mine a few months ago after an incident. But this is a band-aid. Our personal information has been out there for years and we have no way to call it back. That’s a gushing wound and no band-aid will fix it.
Our American system using Social Security Numbers (SSNs) for authentication is fundamentally flawed. I proposed a solution back in 2017 and made a video about it. Nobody cared. Nice to see that in 2024, other influential people are finally starting to propose similar solutions.
About the only smart thing I said during my five minutes of fame was, let’s use our collective voices to demand systemic change similar to my 2017 proposal. Hey, I’m not proud. When we finally fix this broken system, we’ll have fewer identity-theft victims and they’ll have more money to buy my books.
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