Live in Illinois? Your Social Security Number Probably Stolen Now

Do you live in Illinois? Then you have a very good reason to be concerned. Thanks to a class-action lawsuit, it's been revealed that a background check company had a data breach which compromised nearly 3 billion social security numbers and includes every single citizen in the Land of Lincoln.

Along with my more than four decades in broadcast, I have also been a certified computer tech for almost half that. That's why I pay special attention to technology issues and this is a big one. I saw this report on Yahoo News which I believe originated on the Los Angeles Times.

There's a hacker group called USDoD that claimed a few months ago that they had nearly everyone's social security number after they accessed data from an organization called National Public Data who do background checks on individuals. Normally when you share personal information with a company, you have to voluntarily opt-in to allow your information to be provided. The class-action lawsuit alleges that National Public Data accessed data by scraping other databases meaning the information they had was kept without anyone giving them permission to have it.

The possible result? It's very likely that the dark web now has your social security number and it becomes an even bigger problem if they can connect it to your email address and other personal information.

It's very important that you pay close attention to your bank account and your credit report if you live in Illinois or any other state for that matter. If this allegation of a massive data breach proves to be true, all of our personal information and identities could be in great danger.