Tag Data Breach

My State of the World Address

Michael 9 Comments

Tomorrow President Trump will deliver the State of the Union Address. Later tomorrow news and social media sites (which sound remarkably alike lately) will parse and criticize either Trump’s or Joe Kennedy’s (who will present the Democrats’ rebuttal) comments.

ResidentialSealSo in the spirit of annoying at least half the people out there, and as an official Resident of the United States, I’m going to make my comments on the state of the Union now. You see, I can do that because I don’t need a Trump or God forbid a Kennedy to tell me how my state is fairing. Unlike their addresses, mine is actually based on universal truths. So universal that you don’t even need to be from the United States to relate to them, thus I am considering this the State of the World.

The world is in trouble mostly because people want to believe it’s in trouble. It really isn’t. Without sounding like a t-shirt, keep calm and pray if you got ’em. What the world needs is a good dose of common sense. Here are some reasons why.

We are our own worst enemies. This weekend’s local news was filled with the city’s school’s teachers who are threatening to strike. They want to be paid more and to contribute less to their benefits. They will probably strike and eventually a compromise will be approved and they will get more money and a lower contribution though not as much or as great as they would like and will grudgingly return to work. Like labor unions that represent workers who make or sell something, the teacher unions don’t take into consideration that the extra money that must be spent on their increases must come from somewhere and it won’t be from profits. It will be from higher prices or to compensate for the teachers’ and other government employees’ windfalls, higher taxes. These will turn into reasons for next year’s higher pay demands by other unions, cost of living adjustments demands by non-union workers, and increased minimum wage proposals by politicians and thus the cycle continues. This is why although the average wage has risen from $7,300 in 1967 to $73,300 over fifty years to 2017, a tenfold increase, the average new car that in 1967 cost $2,750 cost $33,500 in 2917, 12 times as much as from 50 years prior, and the average house that cost $14,250 in 1967 rose to $377,100 in 2017, 26 & 1/2 times greater. Don’t even ask about insurance rates.

Big Pharma is not out to get you and all doctors are not pill mills. Yes, drug companies manufacture and wholesale opioid narcotics. Yes, opioid narcotics are an addictive nightmare and some abused opioids began as prescriptions. But most opioid that are being abused are being manufactured in illegal labs by criminals. Heroin and heroin/fentanyl combinations are by far the largest abused, and deadly, opioids. But, opioid by class are only the fifth most abused substances coming in behind alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamine, and cocaine. Prescription drug abuse ranks higher only when you include the prescribed opioids with benzodiazapines (anybody remember “Valley of the Dolls”), codeine and codeine derivatives, anabolic steroids, and the prescription stimulants methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine (Aderall).

It should not come as a surprise that efforts to fight opioid addiction are misdirected since every other addiction is being mistreated or outright ignored. Oooh, oooh, drugs are bad, drugs are bad say the sheep. Ooh, ooh, Marijuana is soooo good and it cures all kinds of diseases so we should all be allowed to have some say the same sheep. Drinking and driving is clearly bad. Sixty-five percent of fatal single vehicle accidents involve alcohol, 29% of all fatal accidents involve alcohol. Three drinks will impair an average build adult. Don’t drive if you drink that third drink! Cigarette smoking is evil. Period. The nicotine will get you every time. There is nicotine in those vaping thingies! That’s why people crave them. Duh!

Guns don’t kill people. But they sure do make it easy for people to. Especially those that fire 150 rounds a minute. Without taking the all or none approach can we agree that automatic weapons don’t belong in the hands anybody not currently and actively serving in the military in a combat zone? Hunting and target shooting can be accomplished quite nicely one bullet at a time.

Climate change is real. It’s also inevitable. The world changes. It has changed. It will continue to change. That’s how we got here. That’s how we’ll leave. Deal with it.

We are own worst enemies, part two. Data breaches continue and will so. Some of the biggest you may not have even know. The ten biggest data breaches by number of people’s information exposed are Yahoo (twice for number 1 and 2 at 3 billion in December 2016 and 500 million in September 2016), My Space (360 million, May 2016), Equifax (145.5 million, September 2017), EBay (145 million, May 2014), Target (110 million, November 2013), LinkedIn (100 million, May  2016), AOL (92 million, 2007), JP Morgan Chase (83 million, October 2013), and Anthem Health (80 million, February 2015). Just for grins, do you know who comes in at #11? The Sony Playstation network with 77 million exposures back in April of 2011. And who even knew that My Space still had 360 million users two years ago? Our privacy and our money are at risk every time we access the interwebs. Yet we continue to use digital financing at increasing rates. Starbucks now has stores that do not accept cash joining a growing trend of restaurants and convenience stores in large metropolitan areas that have gone cashless, and Internet sales in 2017 represented over 9% of all retail sales in the U.S. up from 3.6% in 2008.

I could go on. And on and on. But I won’t in the hopes of keeping a few readers. If you want an improving future it’s clear what we have to do. Rekindle common sense, invoke rational thinking, and pray if you got ’em.

NB: Salary and cost figures by USA Today; drug use figures via National Institute on Drug Abuse; drinking and driving statistics via Father’s Against Drunk Driving (FADD), data breaches and rates by USA Today, E-commerce statistics by U.S. Census Bureau.

 

Breach My Britches

Michael Leave a comment

We’ve talked about this before and people aren’t listening.  Or maybe they are and they don’t care.  After all, it’s their money if they want to give it away.  It just seems that it’s more the Average Joe and Josephine that are being bamboozled.  And just what are we talking about?  Call it what you will from the polite “breach” to the let’s-be-honest-about-this “theft.”  (And you’re probably figuring out that this isn’t going to be one of those breezy, happy go lucky posts today.)

So, here’s the deal.  Now K-Mart has joined Target and Home Depot and Michael’s and even P. F. Chang’s and Dairy Queen having had their charge systems hacked.  And what about all the other stores owned by the same companies?  If K-Mart’s systems have been compromised what about Sears and Lands’ End and Parts Direct?  Is our money in peril at these stores also?

How do we know these attacks are aimed at the little guys, the you’s and me’s of the world?  Look at the targets, like Target.  Not the sort of places Donald Trump patronizes.  Why us?  Because is seems for the good or bad, our demographic doesn’t pay much attention to our money.  We’re funny that way.  We might make sure our 401K is being matched but we willingly hand over our debit and credit card numbers to any retailer – brick and mortar, on-line, or phone.  It might only be a $10 purchase but it’s usually $10 we don’t have in our pockets and pull out a card for payment.  Stop and think about it.  When was the last time you used real money for gas?

So using money might help to fix things.  If there aren’t cards being used then cards’ information can’t be stolen.  But what about virtual stores?  You can’t stuff a $20 bill into a modem.  We used to use things called checks.  We would order something, send in a check for payment, and the store sent us merchandise in return.  Just like with money!  So you had to wait a few extra days but it beats spending days on end trying to convince the good folks at your local bank that you really didn’t go to Barbados last weekend and spend $2,400 on Jet Ski rentals.

If you think you’d like to get in on this new-fangled thing called money you better do it quickly.  It seems a number of banks are considering doing away with, and some actually already have done away with branch offices.  They could soon be no bank to go to get money.  We’ll still have ATMs but they aren’t any more secure than the stores’ money systems.  In fact, banks have already been hacked.  JP Morgan Chase may be the most recent, and affecting 76 million households the largest, but it’s not the first bank to lose our data.  (See list below.)

Where do you shop?  Big box stores, grocery stores, on-line? This year’s retail “winners” in the data breach contest are the thieves who hacked into Home Depot, Target, Supervalu, Neiman Marcus, Michael’s, E-Bay, and K-Mart.  Where do you bank?  There are too many of them that have been lost to thieves to even think about.  And when you think about banking don’t just think about your debit card.  Where are your credit cards issued, processed, and billed?  Who holds your investments?  Do you have retirement funds sitting somewhere?  And who will be next?  Insurance companies or utilities?

A poll taken by the Travelers’ insurance companies in July of this year discovered that only 23 percent of those questioned worry a great deal about identity theft.  Even though the past year has seen at least a half-dozen major news stories on significant data breaches, this number is actually less than those who worried a great deal about identity theft in May of last year (31%).

So come on now.  Join us and join the folding money brigade.  Do you know where your cash is?

Now that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you.

 

(To see our past posts on this topic please enter “Debit” into the search box at the upper right of this screen.  To see the real scary stuff, type in “Bank Data Breach” or “Retail Data Breach” into a search engine, skip the articles and go straight to the comments.  Scary, scary.)

The Top Ten Data Breaches per Bankrate.com (Data from 2013, does not include 2014 incidences.):

Target (affected 40 million card accounts and 70 million customer data for $1.5 billion)
Global Payments, Inc. (1.5 million card accounts for $90 million)
Tricare US Military medical insurance (5 million beneficiaries’ identities stolen)
Citibank (360,000 credit card accounts for $19.4 million)
Sony (100 million users’ identities stolen)
Heartland Payment Services, credit card processor (130 million card accounts for $2.8 billion)
Bank of New York- Mellon (12.5 million customers’ personal data lost during back-up transfer)
Countrywide Financial (17 million accounts downloaded by employee and sold to other lenders)
T. J. Maxx (90 million card accounts for $2.47 billion)
Veterans’ Administration (26.5 million veterans and active duty identities stolen)