This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of LifeLock Twitter for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
Most of us use the internet for email, social media, surfing and even banking. So this brings up the question “How hack-friendly is your password?”. This brings up a whole lot of questions for many of us who use the World Wide Web. It could be a family member or a friend that is affected by this growing problem. The following stats to me are extremely alarming.
• Households earning $100k + per year have the highest identity fraud rate at 7.4%
• Average cost per person of having identities stolen is $1,513
• 11.6 million adults were victims of identity fraud in 2011 and a total of $18 billion was lost.
This is very alarming that social media/smartphone users have experienced identity fraud as well. The stats below I am sure will be alarming to many.
• 6.6% of victims are smartphone owners
• 6.8% of victims are social media users who click on the applications
• 8.2% of victims are social media users who have “checked in” using their smartphone GPS
• 10.1% of victims are LinkedIn users
A few other things I found when researching identity theft was that it if you only have 6 characters in your password with no symbol, it only takes a professional .000224 seconds to hack it. If you have 10 characters and one symbol in your password, it takes up to 20 days for a professional to break in. So what would this mean to your online banking, personal information and overall privacy? Are you alarmed by the stats listed? I know I am.
Do you think you are safe? What would you do to keep yourself safe? One place you can go to get help is LifeLock. They specialize in identity theft and are backed by a $1 million total service guarantee. So you know that your information is safe from hackers. You can also follow LifeLock on Twitter to get up to date news and warnings that you can use to stay safe while on the web. Have you had any experience with identity theft? I would love to hear what your experiences have been.
