ID theft stings, but it’s hard to pin on one hack

NEW YORK – Equifax 2017. Marriott 2018. Capital One 2019.

Data breaches through hacking attacks are distressingly common these days, and personal details about you can lead to identity theft, such as credit cards and loans in your name.

But it’s hard to pin the blame on any specific hack, as the most sophisticated criminals combine data from multiple attacks to better impersonate you.

“That’s why fraud can be emotionally challenging,” said Kyle Marchini, a specialist in fraud management at the financial research group Javelin.

“It just comes out of the blue, and there’s no way to identify where it came from or what I could have done to prevent that.”

While the number of reported breaches decreased slightly last year to 1,244, according to the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, the total number of records exposed more than doubled to 447 million.

That suggests hackers are focusing on larger organizations with bigger payoffs.

Last year’s figures include data on about 383 million Marriott guests in a breach that investigators suspect is tied to the Chinese government.

Criminal rings often buy datasets from multiple hacks to commit fraud. The idea is to collect enough information to get past ID verification and authentication checks that banks and other institutions employ. One database with your Social Security number might have your old address, but hackers can simply sub in your current one from a more recent database.

“We’re in this vicious cycle,” said Eva Velasquez, the ID theft center’s CEO. “We create and capture and use more and more data points about a specific individual in order to fight fraud and authenticate people. That, in turn, makes data more valuable to the thieves, so they are going to increase the efforts to get that data.”