If you haven't yet suffered some kind of cyberattack of your personal information, look at the person next to you because it's likely they have.
According to recently released figures from the Ponemon Institute, over 47 percent of adult Americans have had their personal information compromised in the last 12 months.
That equates to approximately 432 million online accounts that have been hacked over the last year.
Add to these startling numbers the recent large-scale security breaches at big companies such as Target and eBay and it's clear that safeguarding sensitive information online is a major problem, still.
The loss of information such as credit card data and banking information can mean serious trouble for consumers. Having this type of personal data compromised can lead to identity theft and the hackers are off and running with regard to establishing fake credit accounts and financially destroying your life.
The recent Heartbleed security flaw news only adds to the growing list of bad news on the vulnerabilities of our digital data today. The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library that lets hackers steal information usually protected by the encryption used to secure the Internet. It compromises the secret keys used to identify service providers and to encrypt the traffic.
"The consequences of these flaws and breaches may add insult to injury for those who have already experienced some kind of personal information theft," a recent Pew Research Center report states. "And research suggests that young adults and younger baby boomers may have been especially hard hit."
The Pew report also mention social media as a popular stop on the hacker trail as researchers claim that 21 percent of online adults said they had an email or social networking account compromised or taken over without their permission. The same number reported this experience in a July 2013 survey.
The report also estimated the scope of the Heartbleed security flaw may have affected up to 66 percent of active sites on the Internet.
Perhaps the silver lining here is that more Americans are now aware of the risks inherent with online life, as Pew researchers are finding.
"As online Americans have become ever more engaged with online life, their concerns about the amount of personal information available about them online have shifted as well," they claim. "When we look at how broad measures of concern among adults have changed over the past five years, we find that Internet users have become more worried about the amount of personal information available about them online -- 50 percent reported this concern in January 2014, up from 33 percent in 2009."
