Child identity theft is a type of theft that can go hidden for many years until the child has grown into an adult. By then, the damage to their identity from the theft has already been inflicted.

This occurs when a social security number is stolen and used to file tax returns by anyone other than the owner of the SSN.

This type of theft occurs when someone steals another person’s medical information or health insurance data for medical services, or by billing false charges to the policy holder’s company.

The Debt Consolidation Care website created a guide on what actions you can take if you’re a victim of identity theft. According to their statistics, 20 people are fall victim to identity theft every minute, equaling about 10 million cases a year. The 5 steps that should be taken in the event of identity theft are as follows:

It is best to contact all the concerned reporting agencies and have them place a fraud alert on your credit report. They will then ask for a ‘victim’s statement’ and request to be notified of any changes to current or new accounts.

This can be done by calling the creditor and requesting the account to be ‘closed by creditor’s request,’ so that your credit report is not negatively affected. Then get a report of the fraudulent charges made on that account.

You can do this online or over the phone by calling the Identity Theft Hotline.

Submit as much proof as possible to law enforcement. Don’t forget to include the FTC complaint form filed from step 3. 

If your ATM or debit card is involved, you should change the PIN. Add challenging passwords to any account that does not currently have one. Activate multi-factor authentication on all sensitive accounts. For banking accounts you can request a physical keyfob to verify identity access.

With the advancements made in the methods that hackers use, large corporations had a taste of their wrath when their systems were hacked into, and customer information was left exposed and vulnerable. A list of the top attacks derived from Huffington Post shows the extent of cyberattacks that corporations and businesses have experienced. Please note, this list only includes cases where hackers have externally retrieved a company’s accounts, not from entities within the establishment.

In April 2017, Sony told its customers that hackers had stolen classified information from 77 million user accounts. This resulted in the company temporarily shutting down the PlayStation Network.

In January 2015, the health insurance company, Anthem, had their records hacked and this resulted in the extensive information of 80 million customers being exposed. 

F rom 2006 to 2008, hackers successfully breached a widely-used payment processing system and took the financial information of nearly 130 million customers.

The multinational, e-commerce corporation advised users to change their passwords in 2014 after a data breach uncovered customer names, addresses, birthdates, and encrypted passwords of 148 million users. Luckily, none of the credit or debit card information was compromised as it was stored separately from the other information.

It is essential that proper steps are explained throughout this book to certify that personal data will never end up in the hands of the wrong person or sold on the dark web.

Imagine the World Wide Web as an iceberg. The top of the iceberg that is sticking out of the water, and is visible, is called the ‘public web.’ This is the part of the internet that anyone can access and find using a search engine. Right beneath the public web is the deep web. The deep web is a place that refers to anything on the internet that cannot be found using a search engine. In order to access this part of the web, users need passwords or direct URLs to access specific content. Finally, right below the deep web, we have the dark web. This is the part of the internet that a lot of people are unaware of and do not have access to. The only way to access this part of the web is through using certain software specialized for the task. In simpler terms, the dark web is composed of websites and networks that are heavily encrypted and concealed from the typical internet user (Betts, 2016). 

In the dark web, special markets called ‘darknet markets’ operate by making a profit from selling illegal products like drugs, firearms, pornography, etc. A lot of these transactions are made using untraceable cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The dark web has become a place where groups who want to remain hidden from the government and law enforcement agencies gather. Instead of going further into detail about the dark web, what’s only important is that people are aware of its existence. Hackers and cybercriminals use their sophisticated methods in order to steal private information that they can profit from by selling the stolen information on the dark web.