Hacking

More than 60 million Americans had their identities stolen in 2018, a significant increase from 2015, where more than 15 million consumers were affected. With identity theft numbers on the rise, it certainly doesn’t appear likely that scammers are going away anytime soon.

Data breaches, once a fairly rare occurrence, have become more frequent as hackers become more skilled in their ability to extract personal data from popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In light of recent security breaches at Facebook and Yahoo, it’s vital that we do a better job ensuring that our personal data remains hidden from criminals and hackers. In fact, Facebook and Yahoo were just two of the over 1,500 data breaches that occurred in 2017.

Without fail as Tax Day approaches every year, the mind whirls while you check boxes and fill in numbers about everything you could have, should have, would have done to save more money on taxes. Could you have saved more? Invested better? Been smarter at charitable giving? Probably.

There’s no denying that Americans are in love with their credit cards; but increasingly, the romance is rocked by the actions of unsavory characters seeking to come between them. More specifically, they’re seeking to steal your credit card information and they are relentless in pursuing any and all technological means to get it.