A report from Atlas VPN finds that one in three Americans worries about identity theft, while only 20% are concerned about becoming a murder victim. Along with being concerned about identity theft, 72% say they are worried about having personal information stolen by hackers. This may indicate a separate fear of stolen information not being used for ID theft, or the two concerns could be conflated.
Twenty-five percent were concerned with being the victim of a hate crime, and 29% of being caught in a terrorist attack. Compare those numbers (along with aforementioned murder fears) to fears of cybercrime, and there’s a stark contrast.
Those fears may be founded, Atlas VPN said, citing statistics that there were 7.9 billion individual records exposed in 2019, a 33% increase from the previous year. “2019 was also the year of someone in the US becoming an identity theft victim every 2 seconds. Health services, retailers, and public entities were suffering the most,” the report said… TechRepublic