Believe it or not, data breaches do affect children

Believe it or not, data breaches do affect children, even as young as infants. The worrisome aspect of recent massive data breaches is that many adults have grown immune to data breach notifications; so much so that nearly half of Americans haven’t even checked their credit following the Equifax breach. If they are not checking their own credit, you can pretty much bet that they haven’t looked into their children’s credit either.

But in recent years, we have seen specific data breaches that targeted the information of children from toy manufacturers and education providers.

The theft of a child’s identity is lucrative to acyber-criminal because it can remain undetected for years, if not decades.Without regular monitoring, a child’s identity that has been stolen may not bediscovered until they are preparing to go to college and start applying forstudent loans or get their first credit card. By then, the damage is done andthe now young adult will need to go through the pain of proving that theiridentity was indeed stolen.

It may be surprising to many but a 2011 report found that children are 51% more likely to be the victim of identity theft than an adult. It was found that one of the victims was only five months old and another teenager had over $700,000 in debt in their name.

And just a year ago during tax season, cybercriminals on the DarkWeb were caught selling the social security numbers of infants for just $300 per social to be used on fraudulent tax returns. While data on children has been on sale for many years, this is the first believed case where hackers are specifically targeting newborns and “fresh” social security numbers.

So, what can parents do to protect their children and theircredit?

The first step would be to treat your children’s socialsecurity numbers just as carefully as you would treat your own. Do not provideit to anyone unless absolutely necessary (doctor, school, accountant). And ifyou have a teenager, teach them how to be responsible with their socialsecurity number as well.

Secondly, if you have reason to believe that your child’sinformation may have been stolen, you as a parent are allowed to request to seeif your child has a creditreport and secondly, if they do, by request you can also put a creditfreeze on their report.