2015: the year identity theft was trivialized?
By the time you read these lines, you must have heard of the huge OPM attack that occurred in the US, one of the biggest breach in history. To this day, over 21 million people are officially concerned.
In numbers, it means that 8.5% of adult US population is officially impacted through this hack. I’m talking here about their UNALTERABLE IDENTITY: where the people lived, worked, studied & traveled for the past 7 years, along with names and details of people who can vet this. It also included the names and address of their parents, significant others (with DOB and birthplace), and 3 close acquaintances. Financial info? Check. Medical info? Yep. Forget Target. This makes SONY insignificant. Hacking the guts of Facebook now seems uneventful. This OPM hack is massive.
In the end, nearly 15% of adult US population is impacted once you factor in
the 1st level relationships.
There is little the victims can do. Credit monitoring doesn’t scale at this magnitude. Jonathan Gitlin wrote a great article about the depth of the information stolen, and how powerless the individuals are in this case.
What comes next is what worries me. Will unalterable identity theft be trivialized in the social media? Will governments get involved? Will the private sector collaborate or balk?
Hacking is here to stay. Yet, there has to be a way to protect our personal information while transferring only what is necessary to conduct business with third parties while retaining some form of control over our personal information. I don’t think we need to invent new gizmos; the core technologies already exist and are proven. The missing link is that governments and private sector need to collaborate to define a viable solution for all parties.
OIX is a good initiative but lacks some control mechanism over personal information. DIACC will hopefully deliver even more value especially when it comes to managing our personal information.
However, to gain real traction in the industry, a viable business model needs to be ironed out between governments and private industries.
This will be good business for governments and private sector organizations alike, while being great for the individual.