As you may have heard by now, the second-largest health insurer Anthem gave away at least 80 million of their customers’ PII records to hackers. I say at least because these always grow as the experts dig through the wreckage. The WSJ reports the Indianapolis-based insured did not encrypt this data (I covered encryption here and here). That means customers’ social security numbers, phone numbers, and other PII were easy targets for Chinese hackers according to CNBC.
Anthem is just the latest. There are even larger targets out there. The Business Insider published some pretty scary numbers. BI reports that somehow the biggest tech companies have done a great job at convincing people that their services for sending/receiving payments and purchasing goods are trustworthy and worthwhile. The article estimates that Apple has somewhere around a billion iTunes accounts (with plenty of PII and credit cards) on file.
This chart from BI Intelligence, Apple (AAPL) is nearing a billion iTunes accounts on file, and that number is likely to surge immensely. Customers in China can now link their UnionPay payment cards to their Apple IDs: For context, UnionPay is the largest card network in the world with more cards in circulation than Visa and MasterCard combined.
Amazon (AMZN) has approx. 300 million payment cards on file while PayPal has around 200 million payment cards on record.
A second BI article indicates that based on leaked Uber data charted analyzed by BI Intelligence, the ride-sharing firm has well over 12 million payment cards on file. Their closest competitor Hailo has 4.4 million payment cards on file.
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You have been warned. The next mega data breach could come from a tech firm like Apple or Amazon.
The WSJ article argues that companies can use many techniques to secure their data, but those things slow companies down, sometimes to a degree they find unacceptable.
I think most victims of identity theft or credit fraud find that unacceptable.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.