Pennsylvania has 5th most data breach victims in the country, new study finds

A new study found Pennsylvania has the fifth most data breach victims in the country.

More than 1,200 Pennsylvanians have had their personal data compromised so far, and the pandemic is making some people even more vulnerable.

The company, socialcatfish.com, analyzed data from the FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Complaint Center. Pennsylvania is near the top of the list with over 1,200 reported data breaches.

So why are breaches on the rise? The report says it’s because a record number of people and companies are now working digitally due to the coronavirus, making it more convenient for criminals to hack into security systems and steal people’s information.

“The weakest link in the chain of security is always the individual,” said Don Gray, chief technology officer for Packet Viper, a Pittsburgh-based cybersecurity company that specializes in deception technology to confuse hackers.

Gray says this spike in data breaches is no surprise Pennsylvania is seeing such a high number of data breaches.

“If you look at a correlation between the states that have the most breaches and the states that have the highest populations, there’s a pretty straight line between those two,” he said.

Gray adds monitoring your bank accounts and credit score are good ways to make sure you’re not being hacked, but he can’t stress enough how important of a tool a password manager is.

“It generates the passwords for those sites for me and it stores them,” Gray said. He cautioned against using the same passwords for different accounts.

“If somebody gets popped, if Amazon gets popped or Google or something like that, and you have that password across 20 different sites, if somebody has that data they now have access to your identity,” he said.

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