Hacking is inevitable

Thanks to the recent Equifax hacks, new information coming out about Yahoo's 2014 hacks, and pretty much a new story every day about how some big company has been hacked and your personal information is now floating around the internets. The guys over at Quartz take a look at the current state of the internet and have come up with the conclusion that it's time for us to just assume our data will be stolen. While this is a sad state of affairs, I have to agree with them.

If recent hacking attacks such as the one at Equifax, which compromised personal data for about half of all Americans, have taught us anything, it’s that data breaches are a part of life. It’s time to plan for what happens after our data is stolen, according to Rahul Telang, professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

Companies are prone to understating the scale of hacks, which suggests that there needs to be better standards for disclosing breaches. Yahoo recently confessed that its data breach actually impacted 3 billion user accounts, three times what it disclosed in December. Equifax also boosted the number of people it says were affected by its hack.