But think about the Anthem breech just this year. SSNs, full name, date of birth, employer and yearly income, home address. Everything you need to ruin someone's life for real, and permanently. Having to have a credit card replaced is an inconvenience. Having to constantly watch your credit because everything an attacker needs to open a new credit card in your name is ruin.
Beyond that though, little inconveniences add up. How many times do you want to have to replace your credit card in a year? And if you have an auto-payment set up but miss changing your card number for that, how much will missing that payment impact your credit score? And how many hours are you spending fighting fraudulent charges? How many years of your life are taken off by the stress of constant breaches?
Life ruining? Probably not. Life-changing? Yeah, it's getting there.
This leads to a ruined life? Talk about a first world problem
Hey now, cancelled auto-payments are no joke. Just imagine you lose your Netflix subscription or (god beware) Amazon Prime over this.
Sounds more like "inconvenience" territory to me, but I hope you and your car are recovering well from this life altering experience.
And the point is, yes, consequences can be rather more damaging than having your Amazon Prime membership lapse.
Seems hard to believe.
It's the same in my country.
But if you're late on payments then a normal dunning process begins. Before your insurance turns invalid you have to ignore at least 3 letters over the course of 3 months.
In the UK they just flip the switch when a single payment fails, without prior warning?
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4162393.htm
"NICK MARSDEN, DEPT. OF TRANSPORT AND MAIN ROADS (Aug. 28, 2014, male voiceover): "No covert activity was done today, Uber locked third phone due to penalty infringement notices being issued yesterday. Time was spent purchasing new credit cards, activating Gmail accounts and setting up two more phones. These phones are the last ones, will be ordering additional units.""
My sister has info stolen from a fake pad at a gas station. It was a debit card. She got all of her money back but it took close to 6 weeks to fully resolve. If you live paycheck to paycheck, and at the time she wasn't too far off, that can be a very difficult situation. It worked out in the end but it was definitely painful for her.
By and large these are not "ruined life" events. Identity theft and fraud are, unfortunately, common and mainstream enough that hitting "ruined life" level is exceptionally difficult. Back in the 90s when the average person didn't know those terms it might have been more common. But now it's just something that everyone, individuals and corporations, have to deal with.
Serious, legit question here. How many lives will be ruined by this breach of 50k? How many lives were ruined when 40 million CCs and 70 million accounts (address, phone number , etc) were stolen in the Target breach?
Ruin seems like an awfully strong word here. I hesitate to say that because I don't want to downplay the importance of security. But to take security seriously I think we also have to be non-hyperbolic about the consequences of not doing so.