Consumer Reports’s National Research Center did a nationally representative survey of 2,002 respondents on personal sercurity.
-- Projecting from that, it estimates that 16 million households have become victims of identity theft over the past year. That’s up by 50 percent.
-- Almost half of the victims—7.8 million people—were notified that their personal information was hacked or lost by a company, government agency or some other organization. That’s more than double CR’s projection a year ago.
And most disturbing of all . . .
-- About 7.4 million households reported that an unauthorized person placed charges on one of their existing credit-card accounts.
-- 1.6 million households had to replace an infected computer, with total national cost due to malware infections almost .3 billion.