With many of your trusted partners playing loose with your data and digital identity, is it time for you to make more effort? Six billion digital records were compromised in 2023 – more than those of 2021 and 2022 combined. (IT Governance)

So, it’s getting worse. The end of the year is time to do something. Many of us are now reflecting on the past year and thinking about how we can improve our habits. This coming year, we propose a different kind of resolution: maintaining your digital identities.

In today’s blog, we discuss what can happen with your compromised data, offer tips for improving your digital identity habits, and explore our solution to keeping your data secure: MiIdentity.

Let’s start with a few facts and figures from the last year…

Millions. Billions. Trillions.

An estimated 365 million people have been affected by data breaches in 2023 – slightly more than the entire population of the United States! (The Independent)

The largest data breach of 2023 happened to a UK-based digital risk protection company, DarkBeam, exposing a massive 3.8 billion records. (IT Governance)

In 2015, the global financial impact of cybercrime was estimated to be $3 trillion. It is now predicted that the annual cost by 2025 will be $10.5 trillion. That’s 5x the size of the UK’s GDP. (Forbes)

Consumers are feeling the effects. In a 2023 survey, 95% of studied organisations had experienced multiple breaches, and more than half of those breached were more likely to pass costs onto consumers. (IBM)

With these huge numbers in mind, is now the time you should be thinking about that 2024 New Year’s Resolution to finally take back some control and track your identity?

Why you should manage your data.

We all provide sensitive data to companies around the world, sometimes as simple as an email address to sign up to a newsletter, other times as complex as our health profiles when applying for insurance. We trust that it will be kept safely and used appropriately. You may not think too much about it when clicking submit, but outside of your control, your information (and by extension, you as an individual) instantly becomes vulnerable.

When a data breach occurs, your information can appear in shadowy corners of the internet – known as the dark web – and fall into the wrong hands. Primarily, cybercriminals use your compromised data for financial gain. With your stolen personal data (name, address, social security number, and date of birth, etc), cybercriminals can make fraudulent loan and credit applications, unauthorized transactions, and empty your bank accounts. With less information available, for example just an email address, you can be included in phishing email lists with the hopes that you may click and reveal more information about yourself.

Depending on how you are targeted, you can be left out of pocket and scrambling to secure your identity. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Keeping your data secure.

As cyberattacks become more frequent with each passing year, we resolve in 2024 to protect our digital identities. Let’s look at four simple ways to do this.

1. Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on all your accounts.

Where possible, enable this feature. 2FA adds an additional layer of security to your accounts, prompting users for a one-time password (via email/ SMS/ authenticator app), or biometric identifier (fingerprint/ facial recognition) be provided before allowing access to your account. If a hacker tries to remotely access your account, they will be unable to proceed. Check your account or app settings.

2. Be vigilant to phishing scams – spam emails, unsolicited texts, and unknown callers.

Phishing scams are becoming ever more sophisticated, in many cases looking identical to communications from real companies. You may receive an email asking to click to login and confirm account details (leading to a site harvesting user data), a text requesting confirmation of information (often linked to a premium rate number), or a phone call asking for all sorts of personal information (you know the ones!).

If you receive anything that seems suspicious: think twice, and do not click – unless it’s the delete button! If in doubt, contact the company in question directly.

3. Check for compromised data.

You can find out right now whether your email accounts have been compromised and leaked. Sites like Have I Been Pwned and Cybernews offer free tools that reveal in which breaches, if any, your email addresses and phone numbers have been leaked.

4. Change your passwords regularly and make them complex.

Having checked above, if your data has been leaked, there’s no better time than now to get your passwords updated. Regularly updating your passwords also means that if your details do get leaked, the data will soon be out of date, reducing the chance for malicious access – a good rule of thumb is every 90 days.

Your passwords should have at least 12 characters and include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols – random jumbles make for even stronger passwords! There are many tools online that can do this and your device may even offer to set one for you, such as LastPass Password Generator or iCloud Keychain – make sure to keep your passwords in a safe, encrypted place.

Use MiIdentity, from MIC Global.

MiIdentity is our all-in-one identity monitoring and insurance platform, brought to customers via our insurance and platform partners. Upon registering, you provide the data that you wish to monitor, and our system proactively searches the dark web for listings and credit bureaus for financial activity. If your data is discovered or a suspicious transaction takes place, you are alerted with detailed information of your breached information – empowering you to secure your identity before it is used maliciously or further financial damage occurs.

In the event of theft and subsequent fraudulent use of personal identity documents, or monetary loss as the result of stolen or breached data, our Digital Identity reinsurance solution enables our partners to provide you with inconvenience payments to help deal with securing your compromised identity – such as replacing documentation or mitigating loss from a fraudulent transaction.

You are not alone in the identity recovery process. The MiIdentity platform is equipped with informative articles to kick-start recovery, and if further support is needed our team is available to help you through chat support and call operators.

Businesses can also benefit from MiIdentity. When a breach occurs, the platform becomes a critical tool in a full-scale data breach response. MiIdentity provides reports which can be used to measure the breach in real time, giving crucial data on the immediate and on-going impact as the breach progresses. Data from MiIdentity enables your recovery team to focus their efforts, and aids in creating specific messaging to support your customers.

Wishing you a secure 2024.

You wouldn’t leave your home or car unlocked for strangers to enter. So, as our lives and activities move increasingly online, we need to treat our personal data with the same respect and importance. With a few simple steps you can keep your data and digital identities safe on the internet and avoid being part of 2024’s statistics – a New Year’s resolution you can be sure to stick to next year and beyond!

“Happy New Year” from all at MIC Global.

Tell me more about MiIdentity

To learn more about our MiIdentity platform and digital reinsurance solution, visit our product page and get in touch with us below or via our contact form to discuss how we can help enhance your business’ customer cybersecurity offering and data breach recovery strategy.

Further reading

Cyber Security for Christmas

Cyber Security – Going on Holiday?

Data Breach Detected! How MiIdentity Empowers Corporate Recovery in the Aftermath of a Hack

In today’s digital age, where personal information is increasingly stored and shared online, corporate data breaches have become a prevalent threat. According to tech.co, at the time of publishing, there have already been at least 50 significant corporate data breaches and information leaks reported in 2023.

These breaches can have severe consequences, not only for the affected companies but also for their customers. Companies can hold sensitive personal and financial information on their customers, with breaches increasing the probability of financial loss and identity theft for individuals… and leading to a damaged reputation for the companies affected.

In this blog post, we will be focusing on the consequences of a data breach for businesses and customers, and how our MiIdentity platform and digital reinsurance solution serves as a vital part of a data breach recovery strategy, enabling companies to support their customers and mitigate the fallout after a breach.

• How do data breaches affect your customers?
• Your data breach response is critical
• How do you measure the impact to your customers and their data from the breach? Introducing MiIdentity
• How does MiIdentity help your customers after a data breach?
• How does MiIdentity help your company after a data breach?
• When should your company start using MiIdentity?
• Leverage MiIdentity for your data breach recovery and supporting your customers

How do data breaches affect your customers?

A data breach from any company has the potential to affect your customers – in the last year, firms with massive customer and employee bases have fallen victim to breaches.

Social media platforms Meta, Twitter, Discord, and Reddit have been separately targeted with users’ personal information, login details and email addresses exposed; while a recent significant hack of Ipswitch’s MOVEit software stole sensitive employee personal data – such home addresses, bank details and National Insurance numbers – from hundreds of companies and government agencies worldwide including recognisable organizations such as Zellis, British Airways, BBC, Siemens, and New York City Department of Education, with the list growing daily as more companies come forward.

Organizations aren’t just vulnerable from malicious external attack either – breaches can also happen from within. A bug in OpenAI’s ChatGPT coding caused the AI chatbot to expose active users’ personal data to other users, highlighting the importance of internal security vigilance when using new technologies.

When any company suffers a data breach, it can seriously impact your customers. When their personal information falls into the wrong hands, they become vulnerable to digital identity theft – one of the most distressing consequences of the data breach. Your customers’ data will be permanently stored and displayed on the web, affecting them in the short and long term. Hackers often gain access to sensitive customer information, such as names and addresses, email IDs, credit card details, social security numbers, and banking credentials – depending on your industry your company could hold more data than this. Hackers and other criminals armed with this information can carry out fraudulent activities with your customers’ data for their own financial gains, for example to open new lines of credit and make unauthorized transactions and purchases… or they can simply cause mayhem with the data.

Digital identity theft leaves individuals vulnerable and grappling with the aftermath of repairing their credit history and attempting to reclaim their stolen identity which can often be impossible. The emotional burden of such violations can lead to prolonged stress and anxiety, as affected individuals deal with fraudulent charges, the laborious process of recovering lost funds, and proving their innocence in the matter. In the most severe cases, victims may suffer social impact and permanent financial damage, with long-lasting consequences for their overall financial well-being.

Your data breach response is critical.

While your company likely has many security features and safeguards in place intended to minimize the likelihood of a successful hack, the possibility is rarely reduced to zero. If your company does fall victim to a data breach, it becomes less about what security you have in place and all about how you respond – especially toward your affected customers. It’s a sink or swim moment for your company.

Once a breach is detected, your company must begin enacting its recovery plans and strategies to secure its systems that were affected, collect and retain any evidence around the breach, and protect its customers and their data. The first two points are tackled internally and are of the utmost importance to avoid further breaches, whereas the third point is public and a much more delicate operation – one wrong move can further damage your company’s reputation.

Next, it is vital to measure the impact of the breach…

How do you measure the impact to your customers and their data from the breach?

Introducing MiIdentity.

In response to the ever-present threat of data breaches for businesses, we have developed MiIdentity – a robust software solution with embedded micro insurance, designed to be an integral part of your organization’s cybersecurity suite and play a pivotal role in your data breach recovery strategy. MiIdentity supports companies and their customers through a combination of data leakage monitoring, security education, and financial reimbursement. MiIdentity measures the overall impact of personal data leakage so companies can comprehend and measure the impact of the breach.

It is important to note that MiIdentity does not prevent data from being hacked or breached data from being used. However, it acts as a powerful tool for an identity recovery strategy and customer reimbursement compensation processes after a breach occurs.

How does MiIdentity help your customers after a data breach?

Your customers interact with and provide personal data to an ever-increasing number of companies every day – many of which are high-profile targets like those discussed earlier – making it more than likely that eventually their data will be compromised. MiIdentity helps your customers after a data breach by notifying them when their data has been identified on the web or has been used to commit a crime. MiIdentity can tell a user where and how their data has been exposed and used – for example, if their data has been published on the Dark Web or used to acquire a loan.

MiIdentity comes with a web application where users can register their data for monitoring, such as phone numbers, email addresses, personal identifications, and financial and banking information. Our team supports all MiIdentity users through the recovery journey with helpful articles, chat support, and call operators. This can range from helping them with the process to rectify financial information and losses, to general security information like creating a strong password.

Where an individual suffers financial loss as a result of a breach, MiIdentity Digital Identity reinsurance supports our insurance and platform partners to provide inconvenience payments to mitigate the cost of securing the identity in question, such as filling in for lost monies after a fraudulent loan application. These timely inconvenience payments take the stress and financial burden out of securing compromised identities, as cash is available fast to get on top of identity recovery.

How does MiIdentity help your company after a data breach?

As your customers enrol in your MiIdentity offering and register identities for monitoring, we begin to collate monitoring data and provide comprehensive reports. Your company can understand the current condition of your customer data and then perform a thorough post breach analysis to measure the impact.

When your business is hacked, MiIdentity proves itself as a crucial tool as part of a full-scale response. Reports received after a data breach can be used to measure the fallout in real time, enabling your company’s response team to track the severity of the breach and arm them with crucial data to help recovery. MIC’s reports provide data on the immediate impact once a breach has been detected, and successive reports give your team clear insights into how a breach is progressing – tracking its growth and measuring the impact of the breach. With this data in hand, your team can focus their efforts internally and aid in creating specific messaging to support customers.

Although your customers wouldn’t wish to have their identity jeopardized; being diligent and having practical tools such as MiIdentity in place during the aftermath of a breach enables your company to support its customers with timely updates backed by measurable data. By playing an active role in helping them to recover from compromised identity, your company can potentially minimise reputation damage and customer trust.

When should your company start using MiIdentity?

MiIdentity can be implemented at any time – with maximum benefit received before a breach has occurred, giving you an understanding of your customers’ data at present. Once active, your customers can be encouraged to enrol in the platform and register their identities for monitoring. Reports start right away, giving your team a baseline of activity that can be compared against in the event of a data breach to accurately measure the fallout of stolen data.

The MiIdentity platform adds immediate value to your company’s offering, with alerts not only reserved for local data breaches but any instance of suspicious activity detected on a registered identity. When customer data is discovered after a data breach, your company can support them with alerts, education, and identity and monetary recovery – making your company a go-to destination for identity monitoring and keeps enrolled customers returning.

Leverage MiIdentity for your data breach recovery and supporting your customers.

A data breach to your company is a severe threat that can have a profound impact on your company and customers. It is imperative for your organization to prioritize robust cybersecurity measures, proactive risk management, and incident response policies to minimize the risk of a breach and actively address and limit the fallout if one occurs.

As more and more companies fall victim to data breaches, MiIdentity has been developed as a comprehensive solution to support corporate recovery efforts. When used alongside cybersecurity systems, MiIdentity gives your business an additional layer of reporting that aids a smooth recovery and demonstrates your commitment to your customers’ digital wellbeing.

This support goes beyond mitigating immediate effects of a stolen identity – it showcases your company’s dedication to customer satisfaction and strengthens the important bond of trust you’ve built with them.

Tell me more about MiIdentity.

To learn more about MiIdentity, visit our product page and get in touch with us below or via our contact form to discuss how we can help enhance your business’ customer cybersecurity offering and data breach recovery strategy.