In late September 2016, we learned that Yahoo’s servers had been breached and upwards of 500 million users had bits and pieces of their private information stolen, much of which later ended up being sold in dark web marketplaces. The breach had occurred 2 years earlier, with Yahoo largely unaware that there was even a problem.
The Yahoo breach is the tip of a very, very large iceberg. Just the month before, Dropbox announced that it had also been hacked (again, some years earlier) and that user information for 68 million account holders was pilfered away. The list goes on and on, and the number of users exposed consistently reaches well into the millions.
Despite the huge numbers of compromised accounts that come along with every data breach, most people actually indicate that they have never been notified that their private information has been compromised. The 2016 CIGI/Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust (http://tinyurl.com/jl8kzh6) makes this point plainly. Across more than 24,000 respondents in 24 different countries, only 27% of people indicated that they had ever been notified that their personal data was compromised in a data breach.
The numbers get even weirder from there. Of those who did know that their data was exposed, few suffered any serious...
